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The Messenger 19 Nov 99

A big, glorious mess. Moments of brilliance fight with streches of ungainly passion; it's like lurching in and out of ugly train stations with a few good vistas in between. For three hours. The star cast is good, but sometimes distractingly modern. Milla Jovovich may not have been the right choice for the role; this here is the danger of nepotism. I wasn't at all sorry to see it but I wish it had been a bit more focused.

Sorry this review sucks. Words sort of fail me on both the good side of this film and the messed up side. Perhaps this makes this more like the film.

(Note: I saw the European version, a good twelve minutes longer than the US version, I hear, and as messy as this film was, I can't imagine the missing twelve minutes doing anything but hurting the film further.) C



I can remember a time when where we went to the movies was just as important as the movies we went to see .... From the moment moviegoers arrived to buy their tickets, there was a sense of something special, a feeling that to step inside was to enter another time and place. - Gene Kelly