METRO
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Touchstone) Starring: Eddie Murphy, Michael Wincott, Michael Rappaport, Carmen Ejogo. Screenplay: Randy Feldman. Producer: Roger Birnbaum. Director: Thomas Carter. MPAA Rating: R (strong profanity, violence, brief nudity) Running Time: 115 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
A cop with a troubled personal life. A ruthless villain. A friend of the cop. A _dead_ friend of the cop. A quest for vengeance. A new partner. A romantic interest. A chase scene. A chase scene _in San Francisco_. A woman in peril. A confrontation. An explosion. The end. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. The preceding has been the plot of approximately twelve thousand and six action films; this one just happens to be called METRO. I have learned to expect little from films like METRO, and consequently I am bored by them more often than I am genuinely disappointed. With Eddie Murphy on board, however, you hope for something extra, some kind of spark. When a film makes watching Eddie Murphy a tedious experience, you know it is doing something terribly wrong.
Murphy stars as Scott Roper, a hostage negotiator for the San Francisco police department who is exceedingly good at his job. With his personal life, he is considerably less successful, facing an unhappy ex-girlfriend named Veronica (Carmen Ejogo), a gambling problem and a mountain of debt. Then his professional life gets a jolt as well when a friend and colleague (Art Evans) is murdered while investigating suspected jewel thief Michael Korda (Michael Wincott). Finding Korda becomes very personal to Scott, and he joins with new partner Kevin McCall (Michael Rappaport) to foil Korda during an attempted heist. But all is not well even with Korda in jail, as Scott, Veronica and Kevin all continue to face life-threatening danger.
METRO (the title, in case you are wondering, means absolutely nothing) is so badly put together that even the most casual viewer may notice the miserable pacing and stray plot threads. In the first place, Korda's rage over being discovered before he can make his big score is rendered completely pointless when he proceeds to hit the target anyway (and, incidentally, to screw it up). A reference to payoffs in the police department, followed by a conspicuous decision to keep Scott off the Korda case and a couple of pointed glances, is dropped abruptly with no resolution after about forty-five minutes; even the relationship between Scott and new partner Kevin is so perfunctory, with Kevin disappearing entirely after taking a bullet for Scott, that you may yearn for bickering buddies. Worst of all is a plot structure which places the main villain (the always menacing Michael Wincott) behind bars for far too long, leaving a lot of time to kill with the tedious reconciliation of Scott and Veronica.
You can't blame Murphy for being unable to muster any enthusiasm for the scenes with his bland leading lady, but he should have known better than to take this role at all. Scott Roper exists in an uncomfortable middle ground between the kind of street-wise fast-talker Murphy has built a career on and an actual three-dimensional character, and Murphy is never able to reconcile the two. The script seems to have been doctored for him, with a gambling problem turned into a bit of character color and his supposed inability to form relationships turned into a cause for gags rather than actual conflict, yet there is still too little comedy for Murphy to work with. For much of the film, he walks around with an intense frown, and it is over 90 minutes into METRO before you hear that trademark laugh for the first time. Murphy is stranded with too few solid punch lines, and nearly all of the ones he does have bounce of Ejogo and fall to the ground limply.
I suppose I should give director Thomas Carter credit for taking the obligatory San Francisco car chase (how much do you want to bet on the likelihood of seeing a car soar over a hill?) and doing a few interesting things with it. As vehicles are sent flying and passengers sent sprawling by a runaway cable car, it is possible at least for a moment to take some pleasure in a goofy spin on a familiar situation. Carter does an even better job by taking that old suspense stand-by -- the medicine cabinet mirror which will close to reveal a killer standing behind someone -- and using it to defuse tension not once, but _twice_. The fact that Carter was able to demonstrate even that much recognition of cliches, and a willingness to subvert them, makes his involvement in the rest of the disaster that is METRO all the more puzzling. An action film like this plods so relentlessly and obviously from point A to point B to point C that you might find yourself shouting out "point C!" while they're still getting to point B, or getting up with the rest of the audience after the big explosion which signals that nothing else of any consequence is going to happen.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Murphy's losses: 3.
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