Success is intoxicating, of course, and it's depressing to see what Boyle
has done with the opportunities those first two films gave him. “A Life
Less Ordinary,'' which opens today at Bay Area theaters, is a smug, bratty
road movie that feels as if it were grafted and photocopied from the films
of Joel and Ethan Coen, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino.
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Cameron Diaz stars as Celine, a spoiled rich girl who can't keep a man.
Ewan McGregor, the Scottish star of “Shallow Grave'' and “Trainspotting,''
plays Robert, a janitor who after losing his job to a vacuum cleaner,
confronts Mr. Naville, Robert's boss (Ian Holm), and — in a farcical
display of incompetence — kidnaps Diaz, Naville's daughter, and holds her
for ransom.
Diaz and McGregor don't know it, but they're pawns in a celestial plan. A
pair of angels, played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo, are dispatched to
bring them together, no matter what the cost, and so they manage to get
hired by Holm as bounty hunters.
What follows is an extended riff on American action-comedy cliches:
shootouts, a bungled bank robbery, a getaway car careening off a cliff, a
country-western bar, fistfights, head-butts, still more gunplay and mayhem.
Diaz is chic and manicured, and she taunts McGregor, a nerd in a Ziggy
Stardust haircut, for botching the basics of Kidnapping 101.
Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory
zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on
American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make “A Life Less Ordinary'' any
less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.
Watching this movie made me ask: When did movies stop portraying life and
start aping other movies? There's so much that's referential,
self-referential or cannibalized in “A Life Less Ordinary'' that it feels
like snapshots from a hundred other movies, full of glib posturing and
snappy lines, with no soul or integrity.
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I liked one sequence — a musical fantasy in a country karaoke bar where
McGregor sings the Bobby Darin song “Somewhere'' and dances on a pool table
with Diaz. Both actors seem to glow with the romance of their
Fred-and-Ginger moment, and the film — all too briefly — manages to
deliver some genuine emotion free of irony.