Imagine “The Trouble with Harry” combined with “Go”, and then take those films and dump it in a pile of shit, and then you’d have “11:14”, an incredibly grueling experience with yet more episodic vignettes except dialed down with a B cast with the likes of Colin Hanks, Patrick Swayze, and Oscar Winner Hillary Swank. One of these things is not like the other… Either way, “11:14” wants to be considered Altmanesque, but really it’s just another “Pulp Fiction” redux, ensemble cast and all, except shitty. Shelved for three years, and finally released in 2005 to a DVD release, and then premiering late night on cable television was a a deserved fate for such a low brow utterly ridiculous ensemble picture as “11:14”.
The plot involves Henry Thomas’ character accidentally running over a dead body, and then hilariously trying to cover it up. See, he thinks he ran over the person, and now grabs the body, and throws it in the back of his truck. Now, logic says that a mistaken hit would garner some jail time, but only some, and it’s never told if he was drunk, yet he takes the body and hides it, and experiences a goofy police officer who thinks the body is a deer. It’s scenes such as what’s depicted in the first twenty minutes of “11:14” that just make me want to throw in the towel. No one in their right mind would write a film like this and claim it’s a drama, and no one in their right mind would write this knowing it would be a comedy.
It just is what it is and no one has to explain a thing to us because it didn’t get any press to begin with anyway. And the remainder of the film is the travels of this dead body from person to unwitting person examining one event through the eyes of a dozen characters that bump in to one another and mix and mesh and get in to sick situations, such as Ben Foster getting his wang cut off, his friend attempting to steal his wang from an EMS car without being arrested, and Hillary Swank shows up in bad braces giving a terrible performance as an inept store clerk who is contending with her friend who needs money badly.
“11:14” wants to be stylish, it wants to be sleek, it wants to be an uber-“Go”, but really it’s just stupid. So damn stupid. From the get go, I’m sitting there with an expression of horror at the sheer cheesy acting, contrived situations and utterly bland delivery. It then rambles on with these utterly one-dimensional situations that varies from dramatic, to dark, to comedic, and neither were dramatic, dark, or slightly comedic. “11:14” is just a rambling, incoherent quasi-ensemble picture with no clear or concise point in sight, and a cast of actors whom have no idea how to handle the story or make something worth watching out of a pretty bad script.