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Honest
*1/2
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Pathé on May 26, 2000; certificate 18; 110 minutes;
country of origin UK; aspect ratio 1.85:1
Directed by David A. Stewart; produced
by Eileen Gregory, Michael Peiser.
Written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, David A. Stewart,
Karen Lee Street.
Photographed by David Johnson; edited by David
Martin.
CAST.....
Peter Facinelli..... Daniel Wheaton
Nicole Appleton..... Gerry
Natalie Appleton..... Mandy
Melanie Blatt..... Jo
James Cosmo..... Tommy Chase
Jonathan Cake..... Andrew Price-Stevens
Corin Redgrave..... Duggie Ord
"Honest" is too confident and
professional to really be called bad, but it's still a bewildering mess.
There's too much going on in terms of art direction and too much going nowhere
in terms of plot, and although it's intended as a star vehicle for the pop
group All Saints, two of them are hardly ever onscreen and the third plays
a character who hides her feelings. I have a question for the four screenwriters:
What the hell is this movie about, why does it take so long to get going,
is it comic or dramatic, and who is the main player?
Those All Saints girls -- Nicole Appleton, Natalie
Appleton and Melanie Blatt -- play three sisters in the East End of London
in the 1960s. They dress up as men and pull armed robberies, but the folks
in the neighbourhood don't know this, and think they're just a bunch of harmless
young tarts. During one botched heist of a magazine office, an American hippie
journalist, Daniel Wheaton (Peter Facinelli), captures and then proceeds
to fall in love with Nicole's character, Gerry. Most of the movie is taken
up by him following her around, and her telling him she's not interested
(but not why), and then he gets entangled in a big violent chase, as the
girls' criminal pasts catch up with them.
This probably sounds dull and confusing, and it
is, not least because it's all that happens in the movie. Things take forever
to unfold, and yet somehow nothing is ever fleshed out. The three sisters
never have a conversation that tells us anything about their personalities
-- all their lines are questions, answers, orders or points of information.
The script tries to use some of Gerry and Daniel's exchanges to compare the
revolutionaries of the 1960s with the unchanging working class, but nothing
much is made of this theme, because "Honest" does not give us a convincing
re-creation of its time. It doesn't so much take place in the 60s as in one
of those "Austin Powers"-style pieces of production design overkill that
pretend to be the 60s by teeming with joints, psychedelic polka-dot clothes,
people saying "Far out!" and hit songs blasting out of every
radio.
Lazy critics will blame the failure of the movie
on the All Saints, or on the director, the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, who
are all musicians making their film debuts. But it's not their fault that
they can't make sense of a script in which nothing happens for long stretches
and there is no real focus for anything, or reason for the period setting.
It's not that I wasn't paying attention -- I watched "Honest" so attentively
that I even noticed the in-jokes on the road signs of the
sets.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
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