I have often imagined how the film of William Gibson's brilliant cyberpunk short story of corporate espionage and betrayal could be made. I pictured how I would do it in my head, but I didn't know if there was enough substance in the story for a complete two hour movie. After several directors tried and failed to get the film financed, Abel Ferrara was finally the one to make it. He succeeds in developing the gloss and style necessary to create the atmosphere of debauchery and intrigue at the heart of the short story, but style is skin deep and becomes a very weak means to an end. Once the movie moves out of the whorehouse and into the plot, it disappears into a morass of visual stylistics and a wasted half-hour of reiterated images that have no meaning and no impact. For a similar treatment of film-making, a viewer could avail themselves of Dennis Hopper's dreadful 'The Last Movie'.
I will give Mr. Ferrara credit where it is due with his film - he creates a very evocative and sensual Tokyo underworld, and gets a strong performance from Christopher Walken as Fox, the head of a syndicate that is going to seduce and snatch the world's top genetic biologist from one mega-corporation to work for another. The exposition, which is long and luxurious, also brings in the tool for the seduction - a young Italian harlot named Sandii (Asia Argento), whose pouty lips, sensuously unkempt hair and beautiful body will be the tool to lure the scientist from his 'ball-busting' wife and displeasure with his current position. She is trained well - the scientist Hiroshi is protected by his employer and it will take extra skills to earn his defection. Everybody will earn big bucks to bring this brain over. Walken effortlessly explains the plot and invites the girl in, although she has been sleeping with his associate X (Willem Dafoe). Dafoe is in on the deal, but is also falling in love with Sandii, even though he knows she is prone to lying about almost everything.
From the point their plot starts to go into action (about the 40-minute mark) Ferrara's instincts go all wrong. Rather than following Sandii into the heart of the seduction, we are kept at a distance - the information about their success/failure is relayed through an exasperating series of off-kilter video images which worked in the whorehouse environment but do not work here, flashing back to Fox strutting around crowing and $100,000,000 being put into their account for the success of their mission. But then, without adding excessive spoilers, there is a terrible betrayal, everything goes wrong, and they wind up on the lam, with X hiding out at the New Rose Hotel. He crawls into his tiny concrete berth in this Tokyo hotel at around the 60 minute mark in the movie and does not leave. At this point the short story ends with a perfunctory sentence or two, but here Ferrara's narrative goes all awry. He expendes another half hour explaining the roots of the betrayal for those daft enough not to understand it the first time. There's nothing like taking a 60-minute movie and then turning it into a 90-minute movie by replaying clips from the first 60 minutes for half an hour. There were so many fade-outs during this time that at least 4 times I expected to start seeing credits, only to drop my jaw as we get another scene of Dafoe in bed with Argento. It was flabbergastingly bad film-making of the sort expected from subsidized European productions, and Dafoe was simply not up to emoting X's desperation, fear and hopeless longing.
Ferrara's stylistics at the beginning of the film lead one to expect something much better, but his narrative sense fails him completely. I give it three out of ten - pluses for eroticism and bare bones atmosphere, a zero for anything past the 50-minute mark.
I will give Mr. Ferrara credit where it is due with his film - he creates a very evocative and sensual Tokyo underworld, and gets a strong performance from Christopher Walken as Fox, the head of a syndicate that is going to seduce and snatch the world's top genetic biologist from one mega-corporation to work for another. The exposition, which is long and luxurious, also brings in the tool for the seduction - a young Italian harlot named Sandii (Asia Argento), whose pouty lips, sensuously unkempt hair and beautiful body will be the tool to lure the scientist from his 'ball-busting' wife and displeasure with his current position. She is trained well - the scientist Hiroshi is protected by his employer and it will take extra skills to earn his defection. Everybody will earn big bucks to bring this brain over. Walken effortlessly explains the plot and invites the girl in, although she has been sleeping with his associate X (Willem Dafoe). Dafoe is in on the deal, but is also falling in love with Sandii, even though he knows she is prone to lying about almost everything.
From the point their plot starts to go into action (about the 40-minute mark) Ferrara's instincts go all wrong. Rather than following Sandii into the heart of the seduction, we are kept at a distance - the information about their success/failure is relayed through an exasperating series of off-kilter video images which worked in the whorehouse environment but do not work here, flashing back to Fox strutting around crowing and $100,000,000 being put into their account for the success of their mission. But then, without adding excessive spoilers, there is a terrible betrayal, everything goes wrong, and they wind up on the lam, with X hiding out at the New Rose Hotel. He crawls into his tiny concrete berth in this Tokyo hotel at around the 60 minute mark in the movie and does not leave. At this point the short story ends with a perfunctory sentence or two, but here Ferrara's narrative goes all awry. He expendes another half hour explaining the roots of the betrayal for those daft enough not to understand it the first time. There's nothing like taking a 60-minute movie and then turning it into a 90-minute movie by replaying clips from the first 60 minutes for half an hour. There were so many fade-outs during this time that at least 4 times I expected to start seeing credits, only to drop my jaw as we get another scene of Dafoe in bed with Argento. It was flabbergastingly bad film-making of the sort expected from subsidized European productions, and Dafoe was simply not up to emoting X's desperation, fear and hopeless longing.
Ferrara's stylistics at the beginning of the film lead one to expect something much better, but his narrative sense fails him completely. I give it three out of ten - pluses for eroticism and bare bones atmosphere, a zero for anything past the 50-minute mark.