Oxygen (Police Drama)
Picture: B-
Sound: B Extras: C Film: C+
Is Mike Curb cursed?
It seems the infamous record executive rarely has had any major breakout
success. Rock Music fans despise him,
The Mike Curb Congregation is often seen as one of the weakest vocal assemblies
in recorded music, and yet the man survives as a commercial success. Besides recent delvings into Country, where
many Rockers who run out of steam retreat go, Curb has tried his hand at
feature film production. The results
are some of the oddest yet.
Richard Shepard wrote and directed Oxygen (1998), a
thriller in which two men kidnap a woman and bury her alive. The title idiotically refers to what little
she has, or she’ll die. One of the
kidnappers turns out to be played by Adrien Brody, a recent Best Actor Oscar
Winner (the youngest yet, for the title role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist). He was specializing in streetwise guys,
which led him Spike Lee’s screwy Summer of Sam (1999) and Peter Sehr’s Love
The Hard Way (2001), but may be poised to launch into other roles
finally. He is good here, and overcomes
the material to some extent, but it still cannot escape the
been-there-done-that syndrome that we have seen literally a thousand times
before. If Curb was gambling on the
talent to save the project, he missed, but was on the right track (for a
change?)
It never develops into the cat-and-mouse game the box
claims, but has other competent casting in Maura Tierney, James Naughton, Dylan
Baker, and Terry Kinney of the groundbreaking HBO series Oz. However, all seeing them did was make me
want to see them in their better, more challenging work. The film is not particularly exploitive, but
part of that comes from how tired it gets.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is fairly good,
but not what it should be for being anamorphic, though the print is clean. At least it was shot on film. The film surprisingly has Dolby Digital 5.1 sound,
which is good and is also its best feature.
The score by Rolfe Kent is not memorable, but the dialogue and sound
effects are clear. Bass is not bad
either. The many extras here include
theatrical and DVD trailers for the film, trailers for other Ardustry films
like the exceptional Rollercoaster (1999, reviewed elsewhere on this
site), cast filmography info in paragraph text (do not look for listings) and
even a mixed commentary track recorded who-knows-when with Brody, Tierney, and
Shepard. That is more than expected,
but it also proves the expectations of Curb and company.
No matter what the resulting film, Brody is poised to be
an even larger star soon, and that will bring his films into more demand. Oxygen is no breath of fresh air in
the thriller genre, but the actors are not bad.
- Nicholas Sheffo
