The Air I Breathe (2007/Blu-ray + DVD-Video/Image Entertainment/THINKFilm)
Picture:
B/C+ Sound: B-/C+ Extras: C Film: C
At first,
as convoluted as Jieho Lee’s The Air I
Breathe (2007) could get, it begins with some great ideas and fine performances
by Forest Whittaker as an office worker so gridded into his work that he cannot
take it anymore, Brendan Frazer as a mysterious customer who may be interested
in more than just playing the stock market and a situation with enough tensions
that you know something’s got to give.
This includes Whittaker’s worker hearing about a fixed horse race.
When he
goes to play the horse, it backfires, he is grabbed by the head numbers runner
(Andy Garcia) and has to watch someone else being beaten and tortured. That is a tired convention of so many
gangster and gambling films, but that could have been tolerated, then we find
out Frazer is a henchman who can see bits and pieces of the future and this
becomes sketchy. When Emile Hirsch shows
up overacting as a wanna be gangster (in addition to his underacting in the
awful Speed Racer, you can see why
he rightly fired his handlers) things get shaky, but when non-emoter,
non-actress, “nothing without Buffy” Sarah Michelle Gellar turns up as a
superfluous character Frazer gets involved with (including a laughable
substitute for a sex scene) the whole thing implodes and never recovers.
Kevin
Bacon, Julie Delpy and Clark Gregg also turn up, but the attempts to make the
big statement fall so far short that the attempt to resolve this all seems
stuck in the 1980s and has zero credibility.
Too bad, because Frazer shows once again how underrated he is as an
actor, Whittaker is on a roll and with different direction, Hirsch could have
helped save this mess. However, Gellar
is a catastrophe upon arrival in anything
she does and her Midas Touch in reverse strikes again!
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image is dull, looks like it was shot on HD in
the worst possible way and has phony color manipulation that flattens out the
color in the most generic way. Director
of Photography Walt Lloyd, A.S.C., does get some good shots in, but it is not
enough to save the picture from looking substandard, a situation made worse on
the anamorphically enhanced DVD with its constant softness and poorer
color. The DTS HD Master Audio (MA) 5.1
mix outdoes the weak Dolby Digital 5.1 mix in both format releases, but this is
a dialogue-based soundtrack and is on the quite side. Furthermore, the mix for what it is still
does not seem to know what to do with ambient sound in a 5.1 soundfield.
Extras on
both releases include the trailer, outtakes, deleted scenes that add nothing
and an audio commentary by Lee, Lloyd, Editor Robert Norman (who may have saved
this from being worse) and co-writer Bob DeRosa, who penned this with Lee. Maybe their next collaboration will work
better, but only if they learn their mistakes from The Air I Breathe.
- Nicholas Sheffo
