Viking Night: Strange Days
By Bruce Hall
March 19, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Against this backdrop, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) plies his trade - the buying and selling of memories. He is a former cop who now deals in black market virtual reality recordings that allow you to experience what it's like to be someone else. They're made by wearing an odd looking headpiece that zaps everything you feel, taste, smell and see onto compact disc. By reversing the process, anyone can experience anything, from what it's like to be Jerry Seinfeld eating breakfast to what it's like to be Angelina Jolie in the shower.
Or maybe the other way around, if that's your thing.
The devices are illegal because - surprise - a lot of people get addicted to them; also because - surprise - the most popular titles tend to be hardcore pornography. It's a seedy world Nero inhabits, but he's not in it alone. He gets most of his stock from a guy named Tick (Richard Edson), who constantly tries to sell Nero "black jack" recordings, made when the person wearing the device suddenly dies. But all this dirty business works out well for Nero; he never buys his own drinks, he drives a smart looking Benz and he dresses like a Star Trek character.
But it can't all be roses and porn, can it? Nero spends his free time reliving experiences with Faith (Juliette Lewis), a long gone girlfriend who's now shacked up with someone else. Basically, his life consists entirely of selling porn to scumbags and hitting it with his ex girlfriend in virtual reality. The only good in his life, and his only connection to the past, is Lornette "Mace" Mason (Angela Bassett), a kindly inner city single mom who drives a limo and has arms like rebar. She disapproves of her friend's lifestyle loudly and often, and constantly has to bail him out of trouble.
She again comes to the rescue when an acquaintance gets caught up in a police cover up. Iris (Brigitte Bako) is a prostitute who happens to be a customer of Nero's, as well as Faith's ex-roommate. She's being chased by two not very nice looking cops in Donnie Brasco haircuts who clearly want her dead. Looking for answers, Nero obviously decides to start stalking Faith, putting him at odds with her new boyfriend, high rolling record producer Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Soon after that Iris turns up dead, leading Nero and Mace to believe they’re onto something.
But this case is too big for an ordinary porn salesman and a single mother/limo driver/MMA enthusiast. So they enlist the help of Max (Tom Sizemore), another ex cop and friend of Nero. Max is an abusive, hard drinking brawler with a beef against authority and who seems far more afraid of life than death. It’s fitting, because with midnight approaching and the city about to explode, time is running out to unmask the killer. I guess I should point out that there's also a significant subplot involving the murder of a socially conscious rapper named Jeriko One, but that might confuse you.
And it’s not just because Jeriko's flow sounds like it came out of the white kid who folds sweaters at Old Navy. It’s because Strange Days has a busybody screenplay that's all too aware of itself. This overly complex story was written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks (perhaps best known for the also confusing Gangs of New York). Somehow, their work results in a combination of showy activism and hit-or-miss dialogue that gives the film a jagged, incoherent feel. It’s as though someone wanted to cram every opinion they had about the social fabric of the 1990s into one bewildering miasma of tenuously related subplots.
Is this science fiction, a John Cusack movie, a PG version of Sid and Nancy, or a ham-fisted civil rights lecture delivered by armchair activists? I can’t tell, because the people who wrote the story don’t seem to know, either. It would have been enough to focus on the world of addiction and craft a somewhat relevant tale about the dehumanizing potential of technology. But no, someone was still angry about the whole Rodney King Thing and wanted to send a lovingly crafted, highly public middle finger to the LAPD. Because of this, the civil rights subplot feels arbitrary, like it might have originally been something else that was hastily changed in an attempt to be more topical.
It not only feels tonally inappropriate, but also irrelevant to the narrative and distracting to the real story, which is a pretty basic yarn of unrequited love, jealousy and betrayal. It's a bit of a disaster, and it’s unfair that Bigelow gets most of the blame. She has a refined eye, and a gift for humanizing the camera lens. The POV shots used for the virtual reality scenes are not only more convincing than the usual hokey proto-CGI of the time (see Barry Levinson’s Disclosure), but they add something important to the film that it sorely lacks in every other respect, which is gravity.
The same cannot be said of the cast. I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned Cusack; he’d have been a better fit than Fiennes for the oblivious, self absorbed mental patient that is Lenny Nero. Fiennes is a fine actor, but imitating an American is clearly not his forte. Bassett feels like a reach - quite frankly, this script is beneath her. Her primary role seems to be monologuing on behalf of the story’s civil rights component. And since she also seems to have some kind of Navy Seal training, she provides a convenient excuse for Nero to make some baffling narrative choices.
We’re meant to buy an unshakable bond between these very different people, but the film never sells it. One flashback is all we’re given to establish them, and it isn’t nearly enough to cement the story’s most important relationship. Lewis shines as an aspiring rock star, but as a frightened young woman asked to keep too many secrets, she’s in a bit over her head. In fact, everyone is except Sizemore and Wincott, who easily slide into roles they’ve both played many times before and since. Bigelow wrings as much as she can out of it all, but it's just not enough.
Bottom line - if you want to see a relentlessly dystopian techno thriller, check out Blade Runner. If you want science fiction served with a heaping helping of social awareness, allow me to recommend District 9. If you want a mind bending virtual reality flick, go with The Matrix, or maybe Vanilla Sky. And if you want to see a shamelessly baffling collaboration between the directors of The Hurt Locker and Avatar, or you just like movies that take 45 minutes to end, by all means endure Strange Days. If you can.