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Studio 54 was the biggest, most important disco club in the world, which is sort of like saying Walter Cronkite's are the biggest and most important shits on Earth. In other words, who gives a flying fuck? The movie about the club, 54, is rotten, and not just because I hate disco. Hell, if somebody made a movie this shitty about a bar that always rocked to Jethro Tull and Lynyrd Skynyrd I'd still be saying it sucked the shit out of a bloated whore's ass. I can't tell what the hell 54 is about, but it has something to do with a pretty-mouthed Jersey kid rising from lowly position of gas station attendant all the way to the fabulous world of tending bar . Way to go, kid - you've arrived - now where the fuck is my Budweiser? There's a ton of other half-assed shit randomly mixed in about old people overdosing on coke, an overdrugged asshole getting busted for tax evasion, a foxy little slut's dream of being a disco queen, people selling drugs, and a bunch of prissy, drug-addled bartenders fighting over dildos. If any of these petty melodramas grab your attention, you probably belong at the cineplex, clapping along with all the other assholes to the lame-ass 70's revival soundtrack. Pretty boy Ryan Phillippe portrays our up-and-coming bartender. He ditches his boring New Jersey existence for the glamour and lights of busing tables in the Big Apple. Through the luck of contrived scripting, weenie-boy quickly rises to the top of the dung-heap at the exclusive club, all without ever having to suck anyone's cock. Yay! Thanks go to director Mark Christopher for letting us appreciate all the naughtiness of the sexual revolution without anyone actually ever getting it on. Meanwhile, he meets swell people, some with big tits, that have also ended up with really cushy jobs in the family-friendly environment of the sex industry. Let me tell you, I've met a few of the ladies down at Le Mans Gentlemen's Club, and they sure don't seem so friendly and free of disease as these little All-American halo-wearing shits. Salma Hayek wants to be a disco diva and, although she hates it, she fucks beautiful people to achieve this dream - off camera, of course. Mike Myers plays the club's owner, a drugged-out gay baldy, living for the approval of the beautiful and rich sons of bitches that flock to his club. His big dilemma is a tax problem that we never give a fuck about. Mixed in to this confused mess are a bunch of sub-plots that start, stop and make no emotional or logical impact on the story. The director, Mark Christopher, seems to think that he doesn't need tension, drama or anything resembling a plot to keep us in our seats. Hell, he keeps the cocaine-sniffing old bag on screen throughout the movie as some sort of freak show comic relief. Then, realizing his film stock is running out, he kills her with a miraculously quick and painless drug overdose. Suddenly we're supposed to give a rat's ass and start blubbering like a bunch of goddamn middle-aged women trudging through The Bridges of Madison County. Christopher should have just gone down to the Wilson Hollow Nursing Home and trained his fucking cameras on Old Man Wither's bed. He would have gotten a lot more laughs and just as much twitching-on-the-floor, uncontrollable seizing. Also, Hayek generates a romantic spark with Phillippe which never gets anywhere close to bonin', but is thrown in at various convenient moments, because the director knows we've lost any interest in the movie. The biggest waste of all, Phillippe falls in love with Neve "Help, I can't act" Campbell in the last minutes of the flick, just so we can all learn an ABC "After School Special" lesson about how shallow people can be. Had this connection been allowed to develop, Christopher might have ended up with something I could sink my dick into. The movie never convinced me that Studio 54 was such hot shit that hundreds of gorgeous, loaded sophisticates would line up
In the end, it is Christopher's complete lack of commitment to any story that makes this movie stink like sun-cooked vomit. Rather than take the time to develop any single character or plot-line, he mashes together a buttload of undercooked ideas, and splices them together with shots of glittery zombies half-heartedly shaking their hips to tired disco music. Not one element of this piece of shit film gets my ya yas out. The fat cats at Miramax Films may have gotten my money this time, but I'll get even next month, when I sneak into their next cut-rate release. In the meantime, I give them one finger, and they can sit and spin on it. |
