Featured Movies
Partners
Air I Breathe, TheTake a deep breath. You're going to need it. In this neo-noir thriller, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a pop princess with a rare blood type; Brendan Fraser is a heavy who can see (but not change) the future who falls in love with her. Forest Whitaker is a desperate stockbroker being bullied by Fraser's hard man; and Kevin Bacon is an ER doc searching for a blood donor (guess who?) to save a long-lost girlfriend from a deadly snakebite. It's the cinematic equivalent of chaos theory, each character's actions impacting on the others. Now exhale... It's also dreadfully pretentious, an adolescent wet dream that goes in search of philosophical profundity but misses, employing clanging voiceover, dreary metaphor and a house-of-cards plot structure that's merely a distraction from its lack of purpose.
Interweaving these four characters' lives Crash-style, debut director Jieho Lee creates a film that he has described elsewhere as being about his "journey as an Asian-American [in a] bimodal world". Quite what the relevance of that sentiment is to the finished product remains unclear.
The action is based on a Chinese proverb, with each character metaphorically named after one of the four Pillars of Life. Whitaker's stockbroker is "Happiness", desperation leading to ecstasy as he robs a bank. Gellar's rising starlet harassed by a vicious, finger-snipping mobster (Garcia, so hammy he's honey-glazed) is "Sorrow". Meanwhile Fraser's clairvoyant bouncer is "Pleasure" and Bacon's doctor is "Love". It's supposed to be very meaningful; but has the resonance of a fortune cookie.
Individually, the stories come with some pluses. Gellar's heroine may be an insipid wet dishcloth and Bacon's hysterical overacting may provoke chortles but there's much to enjoy in Whitaker's opening chapter, his cautious stockbroker finally taking a gamble and losing everything, only to discover a perfect moment of liberated happiness.
He crosses paths with Fraser, whose character is easily the film's trump card. Inexplicably blessed with the ability to see the future, his powers give him the edge as a street fighter and an existential sense of despair that could fill a whole movie on its own. His voiceover is laced with the worst kind of self-indulgent adolescent angst ("Sometimes the things you can't change end up changing you") but his story has the laudable benefit of being fun, not least of all when he ends up babysitting his boss's motor-mouth nephew (Hirsch) during a disastrous trip to a brothel.
Director Lee's background is in commercials. No surprise then, that he tries to seduce us with slick neo-noir HD visuals full of flashing neon reflected in puddles, menacing alleyways and dimly-lit backrooms. His grasp of concept and screenplay has all the shallowness of his former medium though: bite-sized philosophising packaged up in a glib attempt to convince us that this disposable movie is an artful film we want to buy. It isn't.
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