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15
MINUTES
2/10
US
2001
dir/scr
John Herzfeld
cin Jean-Yves Escoffier
stars Edward Burns, Robert De Niro, Karel Roden, Kelsey Grammer
120 minutes
15
Minutes starts off as a Robert De Niro cop thriller, then halfway
through it suddenly becomes an Edward Burns media satire: this isn’t a
positive development. But Herzfeld clearly isn’t interested in anything
quite as lowbrow as a basic cop thriller. He wants to use this crowd-pleasing
format to make an important, serious movie about important, serious issues,
but doesn’t have sufficient skill either as a director or a writer to
pull it off. A shame - if he’d stuck to the basic cop stuff, he might
have ended up with an unremarkable but enjoyable little genre movie. But,
as with his 1996 debut Two Days in the Valley, he tries to be way
too clever and the results leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
Not
for the first time, however, De Niro soars above his director’s shortcomings,
delivering a refreshingly down-to-earth performance after his recent string
of outlandish characters and accents. It’s a pleasure to see him pounding
the old Manhattan beat - this time he’s celebrity cop Eddie Fleming, a
hard-nosed veteran with an eye for the media. He joins forces with arson
investigator Jordy (the aptly-named Burns) on the trail of a pair of murderous
immigrants from Eastern Europe, Emil (Roden) and Oleg (Oleg Taktarov).
15 Minutes pays initially-promising attention to the unusual ethnic
backgrounds of these modern New Yorkers – whether Scots (Fleming), Czech
(Emil), Russian (Oleg), Greek (Fleming’s girlfriend). But Herzfeld doesn’t
develop this idea – it’s typical that the Polish surname he comes up with
for Jordy is ‘Warsaw.’
Andy
Warhol was also of Polish stock, of course, and it’s his dictum about
the nature of fame that’s the unspoken drive behind Emil’s violent activities
– he has an eye on future book and movie deals, having been informed by
a Cockney newspaper seller that “It pays to be a killer in this cahn-tree.”
Oleg, meanwhile, films everything with a stolen digital camera, allowing
Herzfeld to indulge in all manner of obtrusive visual tricks and cheap
self-referential quips as this amateur ‘director’ comments on the ‘movie’
he’s shooting - if anything, Taktarov seems to have a better eye than
Herzfeld himself. The pair offer the shocking tapes to sleazy TV news
anchor Hawkins (Grammer) and the interface between crime, celebrity, punishment
and retribution becomes very messy indeed…
As
does the movie as a whole, unfortunately. The further Herzfeld goes into
the territory of Network and The
Insider, the more crass and caricatured it all becomes. The plot
developments grow increasingly ludicrous, right up to the laboured shoot-out
finale in which the cardboard bad guys (sweaty, lip-smacking, Robert Carlyle-ish
psycho Roden; sweatily immoral Grammer) get their desserts at the hands
of whiter-than-white Burns. “What about the victims? What about the families?”
he self-righteously yelps, and Herzfeld’s lurch from satire into clumsy
political preaching is complete.
13th
March, 2001
by Neil
Young
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