
Chasing Papi (2003)


This loud messy film was just as bad as the original, and possibly worse for wasting great actors. This hour and a half messy, loud, clumsy and clunky cartoonish action flick pulls a double dose of terrible with a plotline so predictable it might have come off the show. In an attempt to retrieve some magical rings which hold information, the angels must confront an evil ex-angel Madison Lee who betrays the Charlie the talking box and wants to corrupt the agency. Now the girls must confront her henchman before Madison discovers the identity of every client under the government’s witness protection program. Perhaps if approached more seriously and perhaps if given three leads who could actually act, we’d probably had seen a decent action flick. The three leads ham it up, and look as if they’ve been on Ritalin acting like a bunch of bubble headed numbskulls.
Kate (Andie MacDowell) is a lonely respectable forty year old head mistress at a boarding school who gets together every week with her friends to tell horrible stories about their week and discover who is the saddest. Then Kate meets Jed an ex-pupil whom she begins to have an affair with. Soon the affair begins to turn into a relationship and she is no longer sad. Jed, her romance isn’t charismatic nor is he charming or likeable and is simply a one-dimensional character who we never get to know much of, so we never care when something happens to him.
We received an onslaught of merchandising and advertising once this bomb was released, and the cat in the hat was literally everywhere you looked, an obvious sign of studios spending too much money on a crappy film, when it could have been spent on a better film. The filmmakers don’t call it “The Cat in the Hat”, they call it “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat”, just to assure everyone this definitely is the book their children and their children’s children read. This is not, however, Dr. Seuss. It’s an embarrassment.
To those who have said in the past that Spielberg, my hero, has lost it as a filmmaker, here’s mud in your eye. With his two most recent films (the great “Minority Report” which received mixed reviews, and the sub-par “AI: Artificial Intelligence” which bombed at the box-office) that weren’t up to his quality Spielberg comes out swinging with this breezy and light dramedy based on the book about real life con man and bank robber Frank Abagnale Jr., a man who before he was 18 made his way forging checks from Pan Am airlines, worked as a pilot, worked as a doctor, and then a lawyer leaving the authorities one step behind him until he was caught. This isn’t a love child of Spielberg who usually takes a personal investment in his many films with his tailoring and presence in the background but the quality isn’t diminished. The quality is in fact plentiful and flourishes throughout the entire length of the film.
“.Com for Murder” and director Nico fails in every aspect of what may have been a good horror film. This film is so laden with attempts at borrowing from other films, its original product is lost in the process. Heck even the high tech computer system the characters use in the film is called HAL which is another attempt at winking an eye at the super-computer from the masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey”, but the name is such a blatant reference it becomes distracting.
This film reminded me of my favorite Hitchcock movie of all time “Rope”. Two high class men decide to join together and murder to see if they can not only beat the system, but somehow gain some personal conquest in the process. The problem is I’ve seen so many movies like “The Curve”, it fails to even come close to comparing to “Rope”. What also becomes evident at the start of the film is that the plot is immensely far-fetched; I don’t know if what’s explained in the film is true, and I could care less, but it hardly seems like motivation for murdering someone, of course is there any sensible motivation?