A LIFE LESS ORDINARY Directed by Danny Boyle
Near the beginning of "A Life Less Ordinary" there's a knockout of a scene: Exquisitely bored rich girl Cameron Diaz (in a white swimsuit that will probably never touch water) coerces her dopey dentist fiance into balancing a carefully polished apple on top of his head so that she can shoot the fruit with her equally carefully polished revolver. At the last minute, the worm squirms, just as the shot is fired. "Call a doctor," the shootist tells her butler, in a tone that suggests disappointment rather than despair.
Yes, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge are up to their old tricks again. Having previously mined murder ("Shallow Grave") and drug abuse ("Trainspotting") for jet-black humor, they're now out to set the romantic comedy on its ear, pairing Diaz with Scottish hottie Ewan McGregor in a kidnap-caper-gone-awry yarn that starts off in Heaven and wraps up with a postscript dramatized via Claymation. No one is likely to accuse the British filmmakers of playing it safe in their first cruise through the American mainstream.
Even so, the millions who embraced their first two films may find "A Life Less Ordinary" a bit less enchanting; certainly the 90 minutes that follow that poolside scene don't come close to topping it. The concept of angelic intervention in modern-day life must be one of those ideas that always sounds great on paper, but on the screen it's given us failed fantasies like last year's clunky remake of "The Preacher's Wife," as well as John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's "Two Of A Kind" and director Alan Rudolph's "Made In Heaven." Casting Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo as militant Cupids ensures that "Ordinary" has a much lower sugar content than most films of its ilk---you call almost retitle it "Slugged By An Angel"---but even this pair eventually wear out their welcome and become little more than a mildly irritating gimmick.
What flashes of magic "Ordinary" has come not from its concept but from its quirks. Having half-heartedly kidnapped heiress Celine (Diaz) with the hopes of getting a fortune from her billionaire daddy, the graceless Robert (McGregor) comes to realize his supposed victim knows a good deal more about working these kinds of scams than he does. When Robert tells Celine he's asking $500,000 for her return, she gasps that at that "if word got out that I went for only $500,000, I'd never be able to show my face in polite society again," and while Robert wants to send an old-fashioned ransom note made up of letters clipped from newspaper headlines, Celine nonchalantly slashes her arm and writes the message in her own blood.
Though Hodge's story is little more than a string of set-pieces (the karaoke fantasy, the bungled bank job, the slam-bang Road Runner-style chase, etc) the movie looks and sounds fabulous, thanks to Boyle's sharp eye and a soundtrack featuring everyone from Underworld to Elvis. Even when "Ordinary" doesn't quite capture the madcap mood it's after, it always offers something unique to look at and listen to, and McGregor and Diaz (looking more than ever like Michelle Pfeiffer's sullen little sister) handle the comedy deftly. If this had been the first film from Boyle and Hodge it would probably have been celebrated as an auspicious debut, but when you've raised the bar so high with two instant cult classics, a middling follow-up is destined to look much worse by comparisson. James Sanford
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