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 Life
or Something Like It (2002) Starring:
Angelina Jolie, Edward Burns, Tony Shalhoub
Director: Stephen Herek
Rating:
PG-13
Studio:
20th
Century Fox
Review
Posted: 5.3.02
Spoilers:
Minor
Rating: 1/4
By
Sara M Fetters.
"It's
a Disastrous Life"
Angelina
Jolie is a true cinematic wonder. With her pouty lips, high
cheekbones, piercing stare and lithe frame, she’s more
cinematic cartoon than human being. That is what made her so
perfect for the role of Laura Croft in the (ill-advised and
quite awful) video game adaptation of Tomb Rader. She’s
already more concept than creature, so having her play a
computer-generated superwoman was no great stretch of the
imagination.
To
be fair, she is also one terrific actress. Beautifully balanced
performances in wildly divergent films such as HBO’s Gia,
Pushing Tin and Girl, Interrupted rightfully put
her atop Hollywood’s A-list. Jolie is magnetic in a way only
true movie stars are, which makes her disastrous turn in
director Stephen Herek’s anemic Life or Something Like It
all the more distressing.
What
is supposed to be a modernistic take on the It’s a
Wonderful Life concept – person revaluates their life by
examining their own death or non existence - Life or
Something Like It is instead a second rate sitcom
masquerading as a feature film. Nothing here works especially
well, and the whole conceit is so tired that it’s insulting.
That
starts with the casting of Jolie. I have no problems with this
Hollywood starlet playing a career-obsessed dynamo. What I do
question is having to take her seriously when playing said
dynamo as a candy-colored Marilyn Monroe wannabe. Watching her
the bleach blonde actress prance around the steep hills of
Seattle in skintight pastel skirt suits wobbling atop sky-high
stilettos is almost more than one should have to bare.
The
whole look pulls you out of the movie even before the plot has a
chance to kick in. Granted, once it does finally get going,
maybe the fact you can’t take your eyes of the ghastly
creation Jolie has fashioned for herself is a good thing after
all.
Life
follows the travails of Lanie Kerigan, hotshot Seattle
television reporter, as she attempts to reach for that illusive
career making brass ring. Up for a prestigious network job,
dating a studly (if vacuous) star Seattle Mariner baseball
player and a take-charge workaholic, Lanie appears to have it
all. That is, until the day she meets homeless psychic Prophet
Jack (a slumming Tony Shalhoub) who tells the blonde dynamo
she’s only got one week to live.
There
really isn’t much to talk about as far as what happens next.
If you can’t figure it out just from that description, then
this movie might be for you. The rest of us, however, should run
screaming from the multiplex. If there is a hell, more than
likely this is one of the films screening there on a
never-ending basis.
No
one gets off unscathed from this mess. The ever-charming Edward
Burns does his carefree best to enliven his scenes with Jolie
with a Tracy/Hepburn panache, but unfortunately for him they
don’t share 1/10th the chemistry of that famous
duo. Stockard Channing shows up briefly as a Barbara
Walters-like network news star, yet her sturdy presence does
nothing to enliven the proceedings.
It’s
huge hodge-podge of a dysfunctional mess of a movie, and
director Herek (Rock Star, Mr. Holland’s Opus)
shows absolutely no intention of trying to make anything
coherent – or even watchable – out of it. At least in Tomb
Raider, for all that film’s faults, Jolie strutted her
stuff admirably. Here you can’t stop hoping for her to fall
and break her neck from having to totter on those heels. That
way we all could have been put out of our collective misery.
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