COMMANDMENTS
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
A story I've never heard before which should have given rise to a unique film. Instead. . . well, just bear with me.
Almost everything bad that can happen to a nice person such as Seth (Aidan Quinn) does. Seemingly, there is no reason for these bad things to have occurred. While he is on the beach, his beautiful wife goes for a swim and drowns. At work, (he is a doctor), he gets fired with no explanation. His house burns down and his dog is killed. Wait! A bit of luck you may think when Seth is told the dog survived. More bad luck: the dog has a broken leg. NOW, Seth is really angry with God. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Seth wants to know why a supposedly just God is picking on him. Do not try to tell him that this streak of daily bad luck is more than mere coincidence. How come good people have bad things happen to them? If you think Seth is going to let God get away with that kind of behavior, you do not know Seth.
Are you familiar with the Ten Commandments (a quick version of them follows here)? Seth is going to break every one of the Commandments one at a time and let us see how God likes that!
1. No other Gods. 2. No false idols. 3. No taking the Lord's name in vain. 4. Keep the Sabbath holy. 5. Honor thy father and mother. 6. No killing 7. No committing adultery. 8. No stealing. 9. No bearing false witness. 10. Don't covet neighbor's house or wife.
Most of the above are easily handled by going into church, cursing, ridiculing a statue of Jesus, etc. But when Seth goes up on the roof of his house to shout at God he gets hit by a bolt of lightning and ends up in a hospital. More bad luck. More of God picking on him.
Seth's sister-in-law, Rachel, his deceased wife's sister (Courtney Cox) invites him to stay at her house with her and husband, Harry (Anthony LaPaglia), a pretty disgusting, crooked, weasel. No explanation of how sweet Rachel came to marry a reprehensible character such as Harry. So far, so good.
Where, then, does the film fall apart and badly? For one thing (probably the most important reason) is that the dialogue is so badly written as if by an amateur. This in turn means that the actors, all of whom have been seen in good films where they were very capable, are here unable to act because they cannot mouth the words they are supposed to say without appearing hammy, ridiculous. (Seth, brandishing a gun), "I have now reached the point in my life when I can kill." Goody!
Suffice it to say, Seth breaks all the 10 Commandments, including number TEN, the latter with Rachel. Rachel has been having trouble with Harry's infidelity and anyhow, Seth IS/WAS her deceased sister's husband and that is only one step away from going to bed with him. Add to that that the ending wanted by the director could only be achieved through unbelievable contrivance . . .
All that good acting capability wasted.
Written and Directed by Daniel Taplitz
1 Byte.
4 bytes = Superb 3 bytes = Too good to miss 2 bytes = Average 1 byte = Save your money
Ben Hoffman
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