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Hal Ashby, cinema's great wounded heart, directs "8 Million Ways To Die". It's a conventional film, but one must remember that at this stage in his career, Ashby had little or no creative control. He was a recovering alcoholic and drug user, and the studio's lack of faith in him resulted in "8 Million Ways to Die" being taken taken away during post production.
Of course when the producers took this film away the moment it reached the cutting room, they effectively shot themselves in the foot. Ashby, who cut his teeth as a film editor, is renowned for his perfectionism in the editing room. He's a master editor. And so no surprise that "8 Million" received a limited release and faded from theatres days later.
Still, though conventional, "8 Million" is nevertheless a fine film. A cosy neo-noir, it also features a somewhat autobiographical subplot regarding alcohol abuse. Here Jeff Bridges plays your typical noir detective, but like Ashby, his character is a recovering alcoholic. As a result, there's an honesty to a couple of Bridges' dialogue scenes. One conversation, for example, has Jeff talking to a hooker. He talks about his love for his daughter (whom he hasn't seen in years) and his hatred of being a drunk. The hooker replies that she never knew her father because he was a drunkard who never came home. Ashby shoots the scene to imply that Jeff is looking into his future, our hero a wounded old man looking at both his own daughter and the very outcome of his present alcoholism.
There are two or three good scenes like this, but for the most part the film's script has been edited down to your standard cops and bad guys movie. One senses that had Ashby been at the editing desk, a more free-form movie would have resulted.
Still, the film begins and ends with two very unique scenes. It's introduction, for example, features a long helicopter shot which tracks across an American super-highway, Ashby's camera framing distant automobiles like elevator carts, watching as they rise bizarrely off into the sky. The film ends, meanwhile, with an unusual three-way Mexican stand off. Ashby draws this scene out to painful lengths, everyone yelling and screaming until their demands reach pathetic proportions. We've seen this scene before in countless other action movies, but none of these flicks have done anything quite like this.
7.9/10 - Moments of Ashby's personality and sensibilities shine through, but for the most part, this film has been hacked down by the studios into something slight. For Ashby completists only.
score /10
tieman64 16 July 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1911631/ |
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28-2-2021 12:08:11