You'll wish you were the title character if you're unlucky enough to sit through "The Man Who Wasn't There," another 3-D dud. It's a supposed suspense comedy involving a State Department employee (Steve Guttenberg) who accidentally gets his hands on an invisibility potion that various spies, agents and sundry others want. The yawns never stop as he's chased all over Washington, narrowly escaping the clutches of a nefarious Russian ambassador (Jeffrey Tambor) time after time.
It's hard to know where to begin in talking about what exactly is wrong with "The Man Who Wasn't There" because there's really nothing right with it. The special effects are rock-bottom (the wires and blue matte lines come through stunningly in 3-D) and the film doesn't even use its major gimmick effectively. Instead of having things constantly hurled towards the audience, all we get is bad actors standing around, mouthing banal dialogue and waiting for something to happen.
What passes for acting in this opus includes almost cartoonish facial expressions, lots of squealing and the broadest kind of reactions imaginable. Typical of this is a fascinatingly inane scene in which the hero's girlfriend (Lisa Langlois) makes love to him while he's invisible. Langlois is hopeless to begin with (she attempts to do a Farrah Fawcett imitation and never quite pulls it off) and this feeble pantomime only serves to make her look worse.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment