THIRTEEN DAYS A film review by James Brundage Copyright 2000 filmcritic.com filmcritic.com
That's it. The nostalgia trip is heading for a long walk off of a short pier. I mean, really, who pitched this movie, and how did they pull it off? Was it, "Come on, let's revisit those good old days when we were worried the reds would nuke the crap outta us." Or, "It's potential nuclear holocaust... with a heart." And, if I didn't know the answer to the question of what moronic producer would buy the rights to the project (I'll give you a hint: he's also the film's biggest star), I'd ask that, too.
Thirteen Days, the second film of 2000 to do a number on the Massachusetts accent (really, you should hear Costner, he sounds like a drunk New Jerseyite), deals with a time period of 13 days during which we almost destroyed the world. No, it's not Crimson Tide, Part 2. It's the Cuban Missle Crisis, and it's presented here to us by the incapable hands of director Roger Donaldson, who gives us such terrors as the "artistic" blending of black and white and a digitally constructed White House exterior. And, spending two-and-a-half hours exploring as few facets of this story as possible, Roger Donaldson tries to keep us guessing. His goofy mind tricks are so incompetent that, at one point as the film underwent technical difficulties, I had to just yell out, "So come on, did we all die or what?"
There really isn't much that I can tell you about the events within Thirteen Days that you can't read in books, but in case you never attended junior high and think the Cuban Missile Crisis was a bad porno, here's the story: In 1962, the Soviets began putting nukes in Cuba, hoping to blow us away. Forget the fact that we had missiles in Europe and had similar attack capabilities -- the Soviets could have blown us away in about five minutes, and, as Americans, we were really pissed off about this.
Admittedly, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a bit before my time, but come on, do we have to see the movie? And even if we have to see the movie, does it have to be this bad? Every time a new character is introduced, they come complete with a subtitle bearing their name and position, and are then greeted. It's surprising Bruce Greenwood doesn't wear a nametag that reads, "Hello, My name is Mr. President."
Dramatic family montages, cheap stock footage, cliched characters, they're all here. And, even worse, the film drags on for the aforementioned 2 1/2 hours, all failing to build even a semblance of suspense. Imagine Apollo 13 if it were made really badly -- bad filmmaking coupled with an ending that you can't change (though Donaldson actually tries to trick us at many points by interspersing stock footage of nuclear explosions into the movie, we know better). The result is not a reliving of the Cuban Missile Crisis: It's a sickening exploitation of a historical event. Don't believe me? Go to the movie's web site (see below) and check out the strategic military exercise, a game in which it's your patriotic responsibility to destroy all Russian forces.
RATING: *1/2
|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Director: Roger Donaldson Producer: Peter O. Almond, Kevin Costner, Armyan Bernstein Writer: David Self Starring: Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Stephen Culp
www.thirteen-days.com ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=filmcriticcom&path=subst/video/sellers/amazon-top-100-dvd.html Movie Fiends: Check out Amazon.com's Top 100 Hot DVDs!
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