Clark Gregg screws up a perfectly good Chuck Palahniuk novel, and along with it Palahniuk's chances of getting another movie made. From the three or four novels I've read, this is less than a national emergency. I don't think we're gonna get another FIGHT CLUB out of him. Actually the book for CHOKE's not very good, but it's not an incoherent, badly lighted, under-rehearsed second year student film either.
Gregg, a decent actor but also the writer behind (pardon the expression) WHAT LIES BENEATH, seems obsessed by only the most prurient elements of Palahniuk's book, ignoring all the nuance, especially of character. The previously indestructible Sam Rockwell flounders in this wading pool of pig manure, and it's all the luminous Kelly Macdonald and Angelica Huston can do to look good and not stutter. My old classmate Heather Burns is excellent as always in her two-scene showstopper, but then she never needed a script or a director.
A Palahniuk novel is about the mystery and revelation as much as it's about the story - though admittedly the mystery is frequently hackneyed and the revelation usually pretty obvious... and the story less a story than a series of cute vignettes. This movie fails to find any of the three. It's less a collection of scenes than a list of missed opportunities.
Gregg, a decent actor but also the writer behind (pardon the expression) WHAT LIES BENEATH, seems obsessed by only the most prurient elements of Palahniuk's book, ignoring all the nuance, especially of character. The previously indestructible Sam Rockwell flounders in this wading pool of pig manure, and it's all the luminous Kelly Macdonald and Angelica Huston can do to look good and not stutter. My old classmate Heather Burns is excellent as always in her two-scene showstopper, but then she never needed a script or a director.
A Palahniuk novel is about the mystery and revelation as much as it's about the story - though admittedly the mystery is frequently hackneyed and the revelation usually pretty obvious... and the story less a story than a series of cute vignettes. This movie fails to find any of the three. It's less a collection of scenes than a list of missed opportunities.