Evil, proclaim the ads for this horror movie, has a new home. That may be, but evil must have neglected to leave a forwarding address, since it is nowhere to be found in this cold, inert thriller.
Like two far-superior summer films, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, Wife avoids blatant shocks, elaborate special effects and gratuitous gore in favor of psychological tension. The model here seems to be Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's unnerving 1968 classic about a nice, convent-educated girl impregnated by the devil.
An astronaut (Depp) returns to Earth in a coma after a mysterious shuttle mishap. Revived but unable (or unwilling) to recall what happened, he quits NASA, takes a job with an aerospace conglomerate in New York City and, to the consternation of his wife (Theron), a sweet but depressed schoolteacher, spends too much time alone listening to a faint, static-blurred radio station. (At least it's not Howard Stern.) After she becomes pregnant with twins, the wife is contacted by an ex-NASA official (Joe Morton) who is convinced that the astronaut had too close an encounter with some alien force. The wife begins to wonder whether she has been sleeping with someone—or something—not her husband and whether the fetuses are even human.
The movie might have registered emotionally, at least as a tragic romance for the Space Age, if writer-director Rand Ravich had dramatized the differences in the couple's relationship before and after the mishap. But Depp is always faintly robotic, and Theron always anxious and sad. No sensible alien would place offspring in such a home environment. (R)
Bottom Line: Strictly for space cadets
Shawn Hatosy, Amy Smart, Alec Baldwin
Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the brothers who wrote and directed the triumphantly crass There's Something About Mary, this time have written (with director Michael Corrente) a sensitive, self-conscious coming-of-age story based on Peter's autobiographical novel. It only goes to show: Give any man time enough to reflect upon his youth, and he will end up sounding like Holden Caulfield in A Catcher in the Rye.
Tim Dunphy (Hatosy), a working-class boy in Pawtucket, R.I., is sent off to boarding school after he rear-ends a cop car during a night of partying. Good-hearted but misunderstood, he runs afoul of the school disciplinarian, smokes a lot of pot and falls in love with Jane (Smart), a pretty blonde who grew up in a proper Virginia family and has the knit sweaters to prove it. The movie does not have much more shape than that. The few high points are more typically Farrellyesque: brutal yet somehow funny bits in which a handicapped boy gets slammed around in his wheelchair. (R)
Bottom Line: There's nothing about Tim
Cuba Gooding Jr., Skeet Ulrich
The government, testing a heat-sensitive chemical weapon in 1987, accidentally vaporizes 18 soldiers. The general overseeing the project is imprisoned, even though he morally objected to the whole thing. A decade later the scientist who developed the weapon, code-named Elvis, continues his research and takes up fly-fishing in Montana. There in Big Sky country, he gives philosophical pointers to a local short-order cook (Ulrich), a former drifter with a troubled past. Soon to arrive on the scene are the general—fresh out of jail, no longer a friend of democracy and determined to steal the weapon—and an ice-cream delivery man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) who is not what he seems.
The Forsyte Saga didn't require this much exposition to get going, and for what? Chill boils down to: soda jerk and ice-cream man in truck, bomb in back, bad guy speeding behind. Crashes, explosions, deaths. (R)
Bottom Line: Ice it
Antonio Banderas
Playing a 10th-century poet exiled from Baghdad for messing around with the sultan's wife, Banderas hooks up with a band of Norsemen preparing the funeral of their chieftain. Blond, swarthy and filthy, they look as if they were weaned on gravy. They burn their leader in his boat, tossing in his live, uncomplaining daughter for company, then are summoned home to fight a power so fearsome they dare not utter its name.
Banderas, heading North with them, must do battle against a horde of flesh-eating, head-ripping barbarians. These might actually be frightening if they didn't hop around in ragged bearskins like some sort of ursine touring production of Cats. I perked up when a scarred old villager warned of a monstrous glowworm, which others then described as a dragon and a "serpent of fire." But it was just a bunch of enemy warriors bearing torches. Even allowing that he's poor, frightened and superstitious, the old man is a total fool. (R)
Bottom Line: Give peace a chance
Leah Rozen is on vacation.
>Sir Peter Ustinov
While making his latest film, Stiff Upper Lips, 78-year-old Peter Ustinov polished off a round of polo—while riding an elephant. "You're hanging off the side with ropes," says Ustinov, who played a Brit living in India in this send-up of costume dramas. "When the elephant sees the mallet, it bolts. It's not pretty."
All in a day's work for actor-director-playwright Ustinov, who boasts a mantel full of awards (including two Oscars—for 1960's Spartacus and 1964's Topkapi). Not that he thinks about them much. "I'm not sentimental about the past," says Ustinov, who recently hosted the PBS series On the Trail of Mark Twain with Peter Ustinov. "I'm too interested in the future." Which will be busy indeed. In the next few months he'll appear in another film, The Bachelor, and will publish a fourth novel.
When not working, Ustinov splits his time between homes in France and Switzerland with his wife, Helen du Lau d'Allemans, a press agent. He keeps busy because he can. "I think it's the duty of senior citizens to take part in younger work," he says. "I'm always aching to know what's happening in the time I'm living in."
- Contributors:
- Joseph V. Tirella.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
