8MM

Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Nicolas Cage	Tom Welles
Joaquin Phoenix	Max California
James Gandolfini	Eddie Poole
Peter Stormare	Dino Velvet
Anthony Heald	Daniel Longdale
Chris Bauer	George Higgins/Machine
Catherine Keener	Amy Welles
Myra Carter	Mrs. Christian
Amy Morton	Janet Mathews
Jenny Powell	Mary Ann Mathews
Anne Gee Byrd	Senator Michaelson
Jack Betts	Butler
Luis Oropeza	Archive Director
Rachel Singer	Neighbor
Don Creech	Mr. Anderson
Norman Reedus	Warren Anderson
Fran Bennett	Nun
Wilma Bonet	Nun
Luis Saguar	Manny
Walter K. Jordan	Thug

Director	Joel Schumacher
Producer	Joseph M. Caracciolo; Judy Hofflund; Joel Schumacher
Writer	Andrew Kevin Walker

This thoroughly unpleasant thriller from the hands of Joel Schumacher (Batman and Robin) offers very little in its lurid tour of snuff films and the seedy pornographic underworld. A wooden Nicolas Cage stars as a private detective hired by a tycoon's widow, who discovers in her dead husband's safe some 8mm footage of a young girl being sexually abused and slaughtered. Cage's job is to determine the veracity of the film and to find out the girl's identity, whether she be alive or dead. What could have been a taut, nerve-jangling thriller is instead a lumbering, overwrought but underwritten tale of vigilante justice. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker also penned the imaginative and compelling Seven but you wouldn't know it from this tired and monotonous script. Schumacher tries for echoes of both The Silence of the Lambs and Paul Schrader's Hardcore (which stars George C. Scott as a father trying to find his daughter in the seedy porn industry) but despite some slick camerawork, the film fails to draw the audience into either the mystery of the missing girl or Cage's supposed internal conflicts. It's not so much the unsavoury subject matter as it is the sloppy and unimaginative filmmaking that makes the movie unbearable. Of the entire cast only Joaquin Phoenix, as a charismatic goth boy who works at an adult book store, comes away with a memorable performance. --Mark Englehart