8mm
dir. Joel Schumacher
Columbia Pictures

Joel Schumacher's 8mm is the Reefer Madness of the pornography industry. Though they share quality of filmmaking, caliber of acting and the ability to induce audience laughter at all the wrong moments, the comparison sticks most in that the wildly reactionary 8mm makes no more serious statement about the deleterious effect of pornography on its producers and consumers than Reefer Madness does about them kids and their wacky tobacky.

Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is an investigator hired by a wealthy widow to determine if the snuff film found among her husband's effects is legit. (A snuff film, as the movie informs you with didactic solemnity, is one in which someone is murdered.) To find out, Welles is taken into the depths of the California pornography industry by Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), who peddles XXX vids and battery-operated sex toys but reads Capote and is, you know, a good kid. Welles scores when he comes across Eddie (James Gandolfini), who in turn leads him to sadomasochism auteur Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare) and the leather-girded performer, The Machine (and just who is The Machine?).

So did Eddie, Dino and The Machine actually kill the girl in the snuff film? You betcha. 8mm was penned by Andrew Kevin Walker, who reaped the bumper crop that is seediness for his Seven screenplay. Per that film's framework, 8mm is a feature-length meditation on wrath: specifically, what kind of righteous indignation can Welles work up against these lowlifes, and will his descent into the murk forever taint his soul? There's great potency to stories cut from this cloth, and 8mm manages to avoid it entirely.

In part, it's because Schumacher is incapable of generating anything approaching pathos in the film. Cage has never seemed less like a leading man, or even a good actor, than he does here; his love for his cardboard construction of a wife (Catherine Keener, who at least tries) and daughter is so by rote that you only have the most tenuous sense that he has something to lose by exposing himself to this evil. It helps not at all that Dino and crew are painted with such broad, cartoon strokes that you can't attach any real threat to them, culminating in the "message"-laden evil-in-our-backyard finale that's the height of hoots.

The script alludes, often, to the idea that Welles might have some attraction to the hedonism that mires so many in pornography; that he is, however many generations removed, somehow complicit in the awfulness that has led to this snuff scenario. That idea, which Schumacher never develops, would give the movie some desperately needed mass—but Schumacher is really only interested in addressing pornography superficially, as a milieu, and perhaps the movie only seems so reactionary because it's totally devoid of any but the most basic judgments. It's a vacant thriller, strip-mining the worst aspects of its subject matter—pornography's exploitation of its subjects, its ensnarement of runaways, its debilitating effect on its users and its violence—for shock value, and offering only empty style in exchange.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)