Change Your Image
ambersknight
Reviews
Race You to the Bottom (2005)
Good acting from one but bad movie all in all
This review will contain spoilers in general terms but if you do not want to know I give the 2 stars purely for the performance of Amber Benson who somehow manages to make her deeply unsympathetic character watchable.
However, that aside the movie is truly depressing. In essence we have two thoroughly unlikable, hedonistic people who are so shallow and self destructive that they are having an affair which given how self-centred they are can't possibly go anywhere meanwhile hurting their boyfriends who for some reason like them. I could almost accept this if the characters learned something from the experience, but the ending seems to hint at the real possibility that they've learned nothing. So we have a very long, depressing 70+ minutes with nothing to show for it. Long travel, no distance.
The acting, Miss Benson aside, is pretty bad. Cole Williams simply lacks any charisma as the leading man and none of the support cast come across with anything to raise above woeful in the performance.
But the onus of this sad project's failure lies fairly and squarely on the head and shoulders of its writer/director. What is he trying to say about relationships and people in this film? Nothing positive at all, in fact I'd almost go as far as saying the director seems to have a real disdain for people and relationships. Worse yet the film certainly re-enforced a lot of the insecurities and distrust that i have about relationships so it doesn't even manage to entertain. it merely sits in what feels like a cesspool of loathing.
The direction is competent to be fair but nothing above TV show, and low budget TV show at that.
I'm a big fan of Miss Benson's, and certainly think she is good in this, but the film is thoroughly depressing, lacking either sympathetic characters or any real moral compass or purpose other than to depress people. Unless you feel like watching a film to slit your wrists to, I'd avoid this film like the proverbial plague.