Word: berge
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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VERY BAD THINGS Starring Jon Favreau, Christian Slater, Cameron Diaz Directed by Peter Berg Polygram Films...
...quite mesh, scenes of physical violence and moments when the superficial horror turns out to conceal nothing besides yet more superficiality. And blood. Blood, limbs and gore, in all of their nauseating variations. Here is where Very Bad Things shows itself to be neither "dark" nor "comedy." Somehow Peter Berg, the director, has decided that because the severing of an ear can be a scene at once terrifying and hilarious in Reservoir Dogs, then any scene of dismemberment is terrifying and hilarious. Dismemberment, per se, is neither, as Very Bad Things shows us again and again. This movie is somehow...
...Berg, a star of "Chicago Hope," is the latest refugee from television to land on the shores of Hollywood. This, presumably, is what gives Very Bad Things its one virtue: It does not look like television. This is partly because much of its content would be censored by all but the most `liberal' cable channels, but it's also because the director appreciates the one aspect of this medium that television completely lacks: the visceral possibilities of the big screen. While the more "artsy" montage scenes in Very Bad Things resemble nothing so much as MTV, there are some moments...
Week after week, the sanctity of human life, the moral niceties of medical ethics, the nobility of self-sacrifice. After all that tenderness, it's easy to see why bright young Peter Berg, one of the Chicago Hope ensemble, would want to try a little purgative transgressiveness...
Within the chicly amoral terms Berg sets--and brutally enforces--Diaz is curiously believable. So is the way in which stunned calm (we're going to get away with this thing) and hysteria (no, we're not) alternate among the well-played accidental criminals. We do find points of identification with them. And heaven knows, some of us are fed up to the teeth with movies glossily restating humane sentiments. Finally, though, Berg's relentless, youthfully enthusiastic assault on conventional pieties grows tiresome. And we begin to choke on laughter that was from the outset pretty dubious...