Rent The Blackout (1997)

A Cast This Wasted - The Blackout review by griggs

Abel Ferrara wanted chaos with this one, and he got it — just not the kind that works.

I went in expecting sleazy, controlled mayhem, the sort of nasty energy that's made his other films crackle. What I got instead felt like ideas thrown at a wall, then abandoned before anyone checked what stuck.

The cast is stacked: Matthew Modine, Dennis Hopper, Béatrice Dalle, even Claudia Schiffer turning up for a stretch. Modine seems aware of what film he's in. Hopper isn't so lucky — his director character swings from smug to unhinged with nothing in between, like a page got torn out of the script somewhere. Schiffer's dialogue sounds like Tommy Wiseau wrote it, or she'd wandered in from his school of acting. I can't tell whether the script or the delivery is to blame — every line lands somewhere between wooden and baffling. Thankfully, she's barely in it.

The camera lingers on bodies far more than on plot, which tells you where the priorities sat.

Some films are so bad they're entertaining. This one just gives up.