'8 mm' snuffs out Schumacher's career

Joel Schumacher had something to prove with his latest film, "8mm." And he proved it, all right - the man who made the "it only cost $100 million, I swear!" box office bomb "Batman and Robin" proves once and for all that he should never again be given a budget over $40 million. "8mm" is an exercise in lame sensationalism, revealing little beyond the less-than-a-revelation that Joel Schumacher is a hack.

"8mm" follows upwardly mobile private investigator Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) on a one-man mission to track down the distasteful people he sees in a home snuff film left behind by a dead industrial tycoon. A snuff film, for those of you who don't much frequent the underbelly of the porn sector beyond the days of a dreamer and the nights in between, is a movie that records an actual murder. Here the victim is a young runaway lured by promises of money and fame when she finds that Los Angeles isn

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures Nicolas Cage ponders his snuff film in "8 mm."

't the city of dreams she thought it was.

Welles spends a good chunk of the movie first tracking down the girl's identity (inexplicably traveling to Cleveland to do it), then the girl's mother, then the girl's path across the country. He makes frequent calls to his wife (a woefully underused Catherine Keener) who seems to spend every waking moment cooing to their infant daughter. Like most of the movie, this lengthy expository sequence drags on and on and Schumacher subscribes fully to the "when in doubt, break out the baby" school of filmmaking.

The movie picks up speed once Tom reaches Los Angeles and teams up with porn expert and purveyor Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), with whom he bonds over a pile of dirty magazines. Phoenix handles the role well, looking a bit like the lead singer from Prodigy and guiding the naive Tom through the seedy world of la la land sex. The two become partners and we learn that Max is just another victim of Hollywood dreams gone sour, but at least we care just a little about him.

Together Max and Tom track down the evil sex fiends responsible for the girl's death. There are three of them: Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini), an overweight skin flick producer; Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare), the snuff film's director and lover of crossbows; and a mysterious man-in-black known only as Machine (Chris Bauer), about whom the phrase "Bring out the gimp!" was originally intended. Once they are found, "8mm" disintegrates into a patchwork of climax after climax (no pun intended) as it struggles to find solid footing amidst the faux-shocking aftermath of the snuff crime and succeeds only in schooling the audience to expect the so-called surprises dropped tenfold into the movie.

Luckily, each moment that Phoenix is present is one that is a little less painful, although the idea that somebody could steal a scene from Nicolas Cage should be the first clue that something is severely wrong with "8mm." There's little doubt that the studio got that clue. The film's ending smacks of studio tinkering - and it isn't even satisfying, resolving tinkering. Sure, things are resolved, but at the end of the film we're left to wonder what exactly the message received was supposed to be.

The message that should have been telegraphed loud and clear to everyone at Columbia Pictures was not to let Schumacher make this botched effort at a lurid, seamy thriller. Next time, instead of making the snuff film, he should be the star.

02-26-99