Gridlock'd (1997) * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Tim Roth and Tupac Shakur are both fine in this unfortunately contrived tale of two junkies on the kick.
The worst thing about GRIDLOCK'D is that it takes a basically interesting idea and surrounds it with prefab plotting, and the idea is forced to surrender. Sad, but that's probably the way it goes: I doubt many people, let alone filmmakers, would want to sit still long enough for an absorbing story about two musician/junkies. I know I would.
Tim Roth ("Stretch") and Tupac Shakur ("Spoon") are the musician/junkies of the title. Based on what we see, they're talented, but they also have a disgustingly narrow world-view: drugs, gigging, and crashing afterwards. They share a loft with their singer, Cookie (played splendidly by Thandie Newton) and have an existence that's not as hellish as TRAINSPOTTING, but is still pretty grungy nonetheless.
One night they get a bad hit of something after a gig, and Cookie plunges into a coma. Cookie winds up in a hospital bed, and Spoon decides it's time to get off the junk. Stretch doesn't empathize. Yet. These opening scenes and the moments in the hospital that follow are brilliant: they're both funny and desperate, and they strike a uniquely black tone for the movie's humor. In another scene, the two of them try to injure themselves to get into an emergency ward; all they've got is a crummy little penknife that probably wouldn't be good for whittling down pencils. But they use it anyway, in a scene that's both funny and agonizing.
The two of them then get plunged into a maddening bureaucratic hassle in an attempt to get into detox. Trouble is, you can't get into detox without Medicaid, and you can't get Medicaid without being on welfare, and you can't get on welfare without... and so on. There is one scene where they try to intimidate a social worker by trying to comvince him they're psychotic and need to get into detox NOW, GOD DAMN IT, and then in a reversal that's the movie's trademark, THEY get the living Christ intimidated out of *them*. There's also a cameo by Elizabeth Pena as an ER nurse who gets her own sadistic little form of revenge on the two of them when they show up for treatment in her ward not once but twice. But then the movie slowly drifts into a stupid shrink-wrapped plot about a drug dealer, with the attendant chases and shoot-outs (at least it doesn't end with the bad guy being shot a dozen times), and for me the real magic of the movie was lost.
The core of the story -- the Shakur/Roth byplay -- is solid. It shows off both actors as being comfortable with the material -- especially Shakur, who would certainly have gone on to do more interesting acting had he lived. Shakur has one remarkable monologue about the first time he popped coke, which sounds improvised, and has its corners and cracks filled in with the nuances of a good-and-soon-to-be-great actor. At the end, I reflected on how good the best parts of the movie were, how senseless it was to clutter the movie up with its stupid thriller plot, and on how we seem to be losing a few too many good young actors these days.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews