8mm - 1999

"You killed her on film. And now you're fucked. You're all fucked."

"Hello, Machine. Love your work."  (couldn't pick between these two)
* *  (out of 4 stars)

It's weird that such film was directed by Joel Schumacher right after he made Batman & Robin.  I'd heard so many bad things about this movie that I was really expecting a total mess, but it's really not horrible. It's slightly better than horrible.

Tom Welles (Cage) is a private investigator hired by a senator's widow to determine if an apparent snuff film that she found in his belongings is authentic.  There's really not much of a mystery here, as it's pretty obvious from the get-go that it is.  With the help of  porn shop clerk named Max California (Joaquin Phoenix,) Welles digs deeper and deeper into the underground porn world, and meets some pretty seedy characters.

It's this portrayal of the black market porn trade that is really where the film starts to stray.  It shows us these weird secret porn dungeons where people sell illegal porn.  It doesn't really make any sense though, because the vast majority of what Welles finds there would be perfectly legal.  There's tape after tape of fetish porn that wouldn't really need to be illegally traded, and then a small section of kiddie porn which certainly would.  It implies that the people who buy and sell this fetish porn would be totally okay with someone openly selling kiddie porn right next to them, which is kind of offensive.  Also, to make it totally clear that we're supposed to be disgusted, Schumacher decided to make all of these underground porn locations look ridiculously gross.  The walls and floors are covered in what looks like raw sewage.  It really requires a pretty huge suspension of disbelief to accept that such an underworld exists, which is a big problem in a film that takes itself so seriously.

Despite this, the film has some legitimately suspenseful moments such as when Welles searches the house of Machine, the killer in the snuff film.  It also has some well-acted scenes between Cage and his wife, Amy (Catherine Keener).  I have to hand it to Cage. You can tell that he's really trying to give the best performance that he can, and with the exception of a couple scenes, he's pretty good.  One of those scenes is the one where Cage views the snuff film for the first time, and it contains some pretty extreme overacting, which was really the highlight of the movie for me.

craziness:
* *

He gets a little crazy in the final act, and there's the aforementioned overacting scene.  Overall though, he could have played it much more extreme.

hair implausibility:
*
It's not looking so great, but it looks fairly real.  This film is one of many where the top third of Cage's head has been cropped from the poster and box-cover artwork.

love interest implausibility:
(zero stars)
Pretty believable.  This may be the first Cage movie I've ever seen that has a romantic relationship that hasn't made me raise my eyebrows.  I guess all it takes is casting someone that's close enough in age, and can, you know...  act.