The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Fear (1997)

Sarah McLachlan's "Wild Horses" plays whenever Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) believes things are good between her and David (Mark Wahlberg), like during rollercoaster sex, but at other times angry thrash metal plays and David doles out a black eye to Nicole, drives like a maniac, cheats, engages in grimy partner-swap sex, and in a laughable homage to "Cape Fear" meant to confirm David a right looney tune, he self-tattoos "NICOLE 4 EVA" across his torso with black biro ink as dissonate chords crescendo, but the genuinely tense abusive relationship that develops between the teens is muddied in the last half of this psycho thriller with David turning out to be as much a lawless gangbanging squatter with daddy issues as he is obsessive about Nicole.

★★☆☆☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Sandra Bullock's character, Alex, wasn't this annoying in number one, I don't think - she whines incessantly about past boyfriends and driving badly and serves only as potential collateral loss in a police operation - while Jason Patric, bravely stepping in where Keanu left off, plays a hero left looking ridiculous as the plot has him leap unhelpfully toward lifeboats and psychically navigate flooded ship corridors, and the writing lets down Willem Dafoe, too, playing the villain who unnecessarily kidnaps Alex when he already has what he wants, leaving this sequel feeling like it is the product of writers asked to follow up a hit at super speed and with no brakes. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)

This Bill Murray comedy, modelled after the spy farces of the sixties, has lots in common with Austin Powers and nothing at all to do with the Hitchcock movies "The Man Who Knew Too Much", with Murray, as droll as always and especially funny doing a traditional Russian folk dance towards the end of the movie, playing an American in London who thinks himself a participant in a theatre sport event, not realising he is in fact embroiled in a political assassination plot.

★★★☆☆

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Event Horizon (1997)

More Hellraiser than Alien, this horror (not scifi) movie from director Paul W S Anderson really does make space travel feel like time spent stuck in a hellbox, especially given H R Giger, not ergonomics, has informed the design of the ship and chaos, not sense, governs the shouty, gory events on board.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Murder at 1600 (1997)

Calamity in the White House, a movie motif on the increase after 1996s Mars Attacks and Independence Day, continues with this 1997 action mystery in which Wesley Snipes' get-in-there-and-do-it detective and Diane Lane's cool give-nothing-away Secret Service agent investigate the murder of a woman in a White House toilet cubicle and the pair of investigators go renegade, even breaking into the White House via its unsecured access tunnels, when they uncover a, yawn, conspiracy involving the President, the President's son, an international hostage situation, and a motive for murder that very strongly suggests - again - that film thinks women are completely disposable objects.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ice Storm (1997)

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, based on a book by Rick Moody, does for the 70s what The Big Chill and Grand Canyon did for the 80s and 90s - present middleclass America in a moment, here an era of nuclear families contending with post-Vietnam War sexual liberation - and while the movie might have benefitted from a few more laughs as 70s upheaval is paraded in the form of packaging peanuts, Jesus Christ Superstar, est training and key parties, the sombre drama is redeemed by affecting endscenes suggesting the inexorable thaw and moving forwards of Time...and along the way compelling evidence is provided that Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood are not, in fact, the same person.

★★★☆☆

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Breakdown (1997)

About a man whose car breaks down in the New Mexico desert and whose wife disappears after she hitches a ride to get help, Breakdown for a moment looks like being one of those nobody-believes-him mystery dramas but quickly develops into something much more akin to a road thriller - it's more Duel and The Vanishing than The Lady Vanishes - and even though the movie cheats and fudges some details and has the look of the low-budget nineties, it really is rivetting heart-in-your-mouth stuff, terrifying - horrifying, even - because Kurt Russell's everyman remains for a long time completely bewildered by his nightmare situation and yet it requires him to claw desperately, moment-to-moment for survival.

★★★★☆

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The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Jeff Goldblum does his zany thing, reprising his role of zany chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and taking the lead in this sequel, a darker, more violent, headache-inducing and overall lesser Jurassic Park movie which has Malcolm sent by John Hammond to a second island of the park to research and document dinosaurs but he finds mercenaries from the InGen corporation are also there with less sensible, more short-term commercial interests in mind.

★★★☆☆

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Turbulence (1997)

This plane disaster movie throws into its Die Hard-esque Christmas context a gang of ruthless Con Air criminals, a Silence of the Lambs serial killer, a Perfect Storm storm, and laws of physics-defying Flight aerobatics, not to mention a Backdraft cabin fire, a "Here's Johnny" The Shining climax, oh and some turbulence, and despite all this cannot hide the fact it is basically an exceedingly silly mid-air "Someone has to fly this plane!" Flying High.

★★☆☆☆

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Happy Together (春光乍洩) (Chung gwong cha sit) (1997)

A passionate but dysfunctional relationship plays out in Argentina in Wong Kar-wai's utterly captivating 1997 love story that, with Tony Leung in the lead, with the prominence of a hypnotic soundtrack, with its foreign setting like a timeless other world, and with its whispered secrets (here, whispered into a cassette player, not a hole in a wall at Angkor Wat), feels as much a part of the director's other romantic works, Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love, and 2046, which are considered a loose trilogy but for some reason not a tetralogy.

★★★★★

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Con Air (1997)

Psychopathic prisoners take over the plane transporting them I forget where - it doesn't matter - and it is up to John Cusack on the ground and Nicolas Cage and his spectacular mullet in the air to thwart the criminals' plans to do I forget what - something diabolical, it doesn't matter - in this shamelessly unsubtle 90s action that just goes on and on and on with lots of slo mo swagger, fiery explosions, and a squealing electric guitar insisting how super exciting it all is.

★★☆☆☆

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Titanic (1997)

The most irritating thing about this romance set aboard a painstakingly recreated-to-scale Titanic is that Leonardo's Jack and Kate's Rose are entirely fictitious, so at every minute of the three-plus hour epic, viewers are left discombobulated by what might be painstakingly recreated historical fact and what else is pure throwaway James Cameron fantasy.

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 2 (1997)

Opening with the original movie reimagined as a movie within a movie, this Scream sequel is certainly a more creative and more self-referential slasher flick than most, but it plays out no more cleverly than that: women are mercilessly taunted, chased, terrified and violently hacked to pieces while men benefit from sudden random death, so while generous critics say this movie (and the series) cleverly subverts the slasher genre, it really only pretends to be clever while mirroring and perpetuating slasher tropes.

★★☆☆☆

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Lost Highway (1997)

Time, identity and memory are at issue in this cryptic headf-, um, puzzle from David Lynch, one in which a terrifying harlequin mystery man (Robert Blake) taunts jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his 'other', mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) with cryptic messages that hint at personality schisms and dark fears.

★★★★☆

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Air Force One (1997)

Jack Ryan eventually became President in Tom Clancy's series of books, and Harrison Ford who played Jack Ryan in two movies went on to become President in this popcorn action adventure - but why not as Jack Ryan is something to ponder as you otherwise mindlessly watch terrorists hijack Air Force One only to have their diabolical plans undone by the most winning, wholesome, fist-fighting, plane-flying, terrorist-trouncing do-gooder US President since, well, Jack Ryan.

★★★☆☆

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The Devil's Advocate (1997)

You would be forgiven for giving up on this movie after its dire opening scenes of wooden acting and leaden courtroom drama but the movie starring Keanu Reeves as a hotshot small-town lawyer who finds himself in New York living the high life under the tutelage of Al Pacino's nefarious law firm boss develops into a satisfying mystery thriller that draws parallels between courtroom right and wrong, and heaven and hell, and is at times reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby.

★★★★☆

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Alien Resurrection (1997)

This time, in an Alien instalment too clever by half, Ripley is resurrected in director Jean-Paul Jeunet's "Delicatessen", a futuristic green-yellow world of zany characters and irreverent detail, but in fact, Ripley isn't Ripley at all but a Ripley-alien clone and empath who once again takes charge of a group of mercenaries when aliens - distinctly Jurassic Park raptor-like ones - break free from their Umbrella Corporation science experiment chambers and start - you guessed it - picking off everyone on board the Earth-bound spaceship Auriga (including elfin robot, Winona Ryder) one-by-especially-bloody-one.

★★★☆☆

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The Fifth Element (1997)

Incessantly noisy and goofy to the point of pantomime, Luc Besson's scifi fairytale is full of elaborate surface details - wacky costumes, sets, and creatures - that hardly compensate for the movie's threadbare, incoherent and overlong story of a 23rd Century taxi driver embroiled in a battle for control of a powerful weapon.

★★☆☆☆

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