“8MM” wants to be a film about the darkness at the edge of American life. It is instead a film about Joel Schumacher and Nicolas Cage deciding that grossness is a mood. The plot: a private detective gets hired to prove a film is not fake, and he follows a trail of sleazy contacts to a New York pornographer. The result is a film that spends its 123-minute running time trading dread for grossness, and never once asking whether either one is worth it.
Trailer, via ScreamFactoryTV.
Tom Welles and the Case That Wouldn’t Die
Nicolas Cage plays Tom Welles, a private investigator hired by an attorney to check a film found in a dead man’s safe. The client believes the film shows real murder, and she wants Welles to prove it. Cage plays Welles with the full, wide-eyed intensity he brought to “Face/Off,” but here the intensity is a problem. Every scene he touches makes the film look like it is auditioning for a franchise.
Max California and the People Who Sell the Porn
Joaquin Phoenix plays Max, a streetwise clerk at an adult video store. He helps Welles get inside the world of underground pornography, and his presence is the only reason the film has a pulse in its opening hours. James Gandolfini plays Eddie Poole, a sleazy talent scout, and Peter Stormare plays Dino Velvet, the New York pornographer who runs the operation. Anthony Heald plays Daniel Longdale, the attorney who first hires Welles. None of them is given much to work with beyond their names, and the film never finds a reason to care about any of them.
The Ambush in New York
The film’s climax comes when Welles and Max pose as clients interested in a hardcore BDSM film directed by Velvet, starring a masked man named “Machine.” The meeting turns into an ambush, with Longdale and Poole showing up to hold Welles at gunpoint. By then the film has spent over an hour setting this up, and what follows is a scene that feels designed to shock rather than tell a story.
A Film Without a Point
“8MM” was selected for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it received standing ovations from audiences. Critics were less kind. The film’s excessive violence and disturbing content left reviewers with little to say beyond the obvious: this film exists to be gross, and it does that well.
The film has a tagline: “You can’t prepare for where the truth will take you.” The truth is that the film takes you nowhere you wanted to go, and it takes you there for no reason beyond the spectacle of it.
The Verdict on 8MM
“8MM” is a film built on a premise — a private eye tracking a real murder on film — that could have been gripping. Joel Schumacher and Andrew Kevin Walker chose instead to make a film that is more interested in being gross than in being a thriller. Nicolas Cage is always watchable, but he is watchable in a film that offers him nothing to do. The film’s failure is not a failure of execution; it is a failure of intent. Its premise is better than its result, and the result is a waste of 123 minutes.
The film’s excessive violence and disturbing content left reviewers with little to say beyond the obvious: this film exists to be gross, and it does that well.
- Title: 8MM
- Director: Joel Schumacher
- Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker
- Runtime: 123 minutes
- Star: Nicolas Cage
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