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| Directed by Josef Rusnak; Starring Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dennis Haysbert, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Steve Schub |
I do not think that this swayed my decision at all, but I’m getting a little tired of movies about people in a virtual world. In the past two years there have been The Truman Show, Dark City, The Matrix, eXistenZ, Star Trek: Insurrection, and now The Thirteenth Floor. I doubt that that had anything to do with my dislike for the film considering that I adored the previous film like that, eXistenZ. My discord for The Thirteenth Floor is mainly in its weak script, one that like so many misguided films tries to be smarter than the audience but fails miserably. I think everybody in the theatre that saw it with me could see the supposed twists for the film after seeing the first half hour of it.
The Thirteenth Floor is about three men that design a system that pits people in a virtual reality world circa 1937. In doing so, the person “plugged in” takes the place of some person in the virtual world where life continues even when no one is “plugged in.” When the lead designer Hammond Fuller (Mueller-Stahl) is murdered after becoming the first person from the real world to visit the fake one, a homicide investigation follows by Detective McBain (Haysbert). This investigation finds most evidence pointing at one of the other designers Douglas Hall (Bierko). The problem is that he cannot remember the night in question. Enter the beautiful Jane Fuller (Mol), saying she is now entitled to her father’s company (and downfall of the project) as his sole descendant. Way leads onto way and due to a letter sent by Fuller before dying, the virtual character Whitney (D’Onofrio) finds out that his world is fake and attacks Hall and his virtual equivalence to get out.
The film runs for what seems like two and a half hours (actually one hour and forty minutes) since it never attempts to settle down for a breather. I got tired of hearing of the ideas as to what was happening coming from Hall and even more tired of a hideously awful performance by Vincent D’Onofrio (he and Francis Ford Coppola are the only people I know that can go from such good stuff like The Godfather and Full Metal Jacket to such awful stuff as Jack and this). The screenplay is far from as tangled as the film wants you to think, as it reminds me of what The Usual Suspects would have been like if everyone saw its ending coming a mile away. The only thing that I really found enjoyable in the film was cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff’s use of lighting. But there is one thing that stands as the best blurb I can come up for this film: It is better than that other Centropolis film: Godzilla.
