What's wrong with this picture:
A film is made in 2003, with a
budget of fifteen million dollars and a solid cast of players close to
the A-list, like Ray Liotta and Taye Diggs. The cinematographer is the
guy who did Memento and Insomnia. It features Star Trek's Commander
T'Pol topless, thus creating curiosity and fanboy appeal. It gets a
decent (6.1) IMDb rating.
Yet it takes two years to get to the Toronto film festival, and
another year to make it to DVD - in Finland!
WTF?
Well, I haven't
seen the movie, but there are some suggestions that it may not be
entirely original.
Variety said, "What begins as a moderately interesting set of
interconnected mysteries involving race and identity soon grows eye-rollingly
laborious, not to mention increasingly derivative of
Christopher
McQuarrie's Usual Suspects script."
eFilm Critic
was more direct: "Wayne Beach may have read in the ripoff
handbook that ten years may be the official moratorium on when you
can outright steal a major film from front-to-back. Although it’s
easy to question why do it to one that’s earned the status of a
modern classic, the one I would ask is – just how big are your
balls? Interrogations and a Keyser Soze wannabe are enough to draw
comparisons to the Oscar-winning screenplay from 1995, so why invite
further ridicule by littering the third act with the near-exact same
conclusion. From the belief that one character is Danny Luden, then
another, than the interrogator’s realization that the first wrong
guess he made wasn’t the last to the guy being right under his nose
only to have a car waiting for him outside complete with flashbacks
and the filmmakers having fun with chameleon metaphors and lens
gels."
Reel Film Reviews
went straight for the jugular, by calling it "a flat-out ripoff of
The Usual Suspects."
