FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| FILM Clay Pigeons Sitting through Clay Pigeons is like watching carpenters build a house from the roof down - the personnel and craft is there, but the methodology is ass-backwards. When you have the money, the crew, the cast, the idea, the location, why the hell do you do a film with an idiotic script that makes absolutely no sense and thats execution is a blatant example of laziness and stupidity? One lazy summer in Mercer, Montana, Clay Bidwell (Joaquin Phoenix) endures a hellish ordeal that starts when his best friend, Earl, commits suicide because Clay was sleeping with Earl's wife, Amanda. The suicide frames Clay as the killer and Amanda leaves him to clean up the mess. Clay quickly dumps Amanda and has a quick fling with a local girl who is immediately disposed of by Amanda. Again Clay must clean up the mess because Amanda has something on him (the "murder" of her husband). Soon more bodies start to show up coinciding with the entrance of cowboy stranger, Lester Long (Vince Vaughn). Somehow Clay becomes a suspect for most of the murders, including Amanda's, who Lester disposes of in order to help out his new buddy Clay. If this is starting to make no sense, wait until you see the movie. A promising start immediately degenerates after the second murder and soon becomes such a tangled mess of stupid cover-ups that I could barely make it through the picture. All of the motivations on Clay's part are such a stretch, there is no way one can sympathize with him. If he's as stupid as the script makes him out to be, why bother sticking around the rest of the film to see if he gets out okay? An example of typical idiocies in this screenplay comes near the end when, after more than a half-dozen murders in a small town, complete stranger Lester can still convince a young teenager to rendezvous with him alone on the shores of a secluded lake at night. (Okay, budding screenwriters out there - what is wrong with this picture?) No one in this tiny town, not even for a moment, suspects him. Blame for this mess goes all the way up the ladder to producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Thelma and Louise) who is a longtime veteran and a director of many great films - how did he allow this to happen? There are plenty of stupid films on the market, but this one unfortunately comes at the expense of an excellent cast, who in their ignorance, or professionalism, bring credibility to the film with their performances. |