This is better than I expected; a 5 character piece that might be called Who's the Narc? But way to go at getting an anti-drug message into a movie that twenty year olds would actually want to see. I will definitely watch this again.
The morphing suit that the undercover cops wear to conceal their identities is a very well-integrated device, despite making for a lousy movie poster, that never created a single urge in me to see this. The minute it was introduced I knew the suit would involve a surprise revelation, just not this one. (Although I was grasping at it early on when I thought, "I wonder if it can also disguise gender or race...") The suit allows a female to have the presence of a male, and escape gender baggage, but has the related drawback of not letting Winona be on screen for most of "her" performance.
One needs to view no more than the preview to note the few benefits and copious problems of the rotoscoping technique; which represents something neither here or there. It solves problems of gradated shadows (always avoided in flat animation) and dynamic camera movement (ditto), but it's more like live-action than animation. It just feels like Linklater didn't think the thing was interesting enough to stand on its own. Every frame of it is beautiful, but the technique is little more than a filter you have to get past. Each frame has a paint by numbers quality and the movie avoids shooting dark, so everything can be outlined later. Some dark imagery would have helped the piece. Hair becomes particularly distracting. I immensely dislike the mangy beard that Keanu Reeve has been sporting in recent years. In rotoscope, I'm watching the movie noticing the weird, asymmetrical holes where it doesn't grow, thinking "Keanu, give it up, that's pathetic!" Watching a movie and being distracted by a beard is not good. And Winona's hair is always too much in motion. But Reeves assembles a character of some depth, and is a better actor than ever here. He is countless miles from the "Whoa..!" parody of himself.
I like Downey, but he again imposes his usual squirrelly, ironic act which is getting very old. How much do you have to loathe yourself to imagine you constantly have to be 50 percent more entertaining than is needed? And Woody Harrelson, here outfitted with a bad wig, is absolutely terrible.
The morphing suit that the undercover cops wear to conceal their identities is a very well-integrated device, despite making for a lousy movie poster, that never created a single urge in me to see this. The minute it was introduced I knew the suit would involve a surprise revelation, just not this one. (Although I was grasping at it early on when I thought, "I wonder if it can also disguise gender or race...") The suit allows a female to have the presence of a male, and escape gender baggage, but has the related drawback of not letting Winona be on screen for most of "her" performance.
One needs to view no more than the preview to note the few benefits and copious problems of the rotoscoping technique; which represents something neither here or there. It solves problems of gradated shadows (always avoided in flat animation) and dynamic camera movement (ditto), but it's more like live-action than animation. It just feels like Linklater didn't think the thing was interesting enough to stand on its own. Every frame of it is beautiful, but the technique is little more than a filter you have to get past. Each frame has a paint by numbers quality and the movie avoids shooting dark, so everything can be outlined later. Some dark imagery would have helped the piece. Hair becomes particularly distracting. I immensely dislike the mangy beard that Keanu Reeve has been sporting in recent years. In rotoscope, I'm watching the movie noticing the weird, asymmetrical holes where it doesn't grow, thinking "Keanu, give it up, that's pathetic!" Watching a movie and being distracted by a beard is not good. And Winona's hair is always too much in motion. But Reeves assembles a character of some depth, and is a better actor than ever here. He is countless miles from the "Whoa..!" parody of himself.
I like Downey, but he again imposes his usual squirrelly, ironic act which is getting very old. How much do you have to loathe yourself to imagine you constantly have to be 50 percent more entertaining than is needed? And Woody Harrelson, here outfitted with a bad wig, is absolutely terrible.