DARK CITY

Did you ever see a film where the premise is so bizarre that it 
takes many pages of expository dialogue just to try and make 
sense of the plot? Such is the inherent problem with "Dark City" 
an ambitious if somewhat juvenile "sci noir action" saga that 
might appeal to you if you still harbor an inner paranoid, 
alienated adolescent.

In the narrative of this ambitious thriller, a man wakes up in a 
hotel room with a corpse and amnesia. As he tries to reconstitute 
his life, William Hurt, as a police man, chases him around.  
Everyone is under the spell of aliens in trenchcoats who change 
the city around at midnight. Keifer Sutherland is the cracked 
scientist who aids the "strangers" and has some undeliverable 
message for the hero, who has mysteriously acquired "superhero'
abilities... and at that point you know that if you're not a 
13-16 year old boy, you don't belong in this theater.

While the film has a great look (a sort of low rent BLADE RUNNER meets
David Lynch with Japanese anime and Clive Barker influences), it 
suffers from set-bound claustrophobics. Another problem is Keifer
Sutherland's embrassing attempt to be creepy. His breathless, studied
delivery gets annoying in the first (breath) thirty (breath) seconds.
Similarly, the actors who play the  "strangers" (the Pinhead aliens)
flying around the 'Dark City' utter all their lines in an affected 
Hannibal Lechter' style purr. Add to all this over-wrought hamminess 
a concept that is under-developed to the point where it requires 
explaining by several different characters, yet still barely makes
sense, and you are left with a film about memory that leaves no trace
of same within ten minutes of leaving the theater.

But the leads are attractive!

RATING: **1/4