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People I Know
(Reviewed April 20, 2003)
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This movie is so preposterously, blatantly awful that I can't believe its producers did not throw themselves out of a window when they saw the finished product.
What in God's name has happened to Al Pacino's career? This bomb follows Pacino's starring role in "Simone," another movie so egregiously lousy it should have gone straight to some not-very-selective landfill. In "People I Know," he plays a seen-better-days New York publicist with a bizarrely unconvincing southern accent who gets mixed up in a murder plot that is like a duller version of "Eyes Wide Shut" made on the cheap. Tea Leoni is an attractive woman, lord knows, but she is wildly miscast as a young, flakey starlet with a drug habit. Equally out of place is Kim Basinger, who is saddled with the insurmountable task of lusting after Pacino's addled, mumbling, overmedicated "shaking mover" (to coin a phrase).
Ryan O'Neal is the only participant who is sort of okay here, as a Hollywood prick with political aspirations, Pacino's character's last remaining semi-name client.
Also, "People I Know"'s version of New York is so offputtingly unattractive that it feels more like a guerilla filmmaking exercise on NYC's mean streets than a buffed and polished movie. That kind of reality can be a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like the gritty city that never sleeps--but I kept thanking my lucky stars that I didn't live there.
Back Row Grade: F
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