Sacrifice

Cuba Gooding Jr and Christian Slater together at last!

Cuba Gooding Jr and Christian Slater together at
last!

Time was Cuba Gooding Jr and Christian Slater were two of
Hollywood’s big-hitters. After an
Oscar win for Jerry Maguire for
Gooding Jr and numerous hits such as Heathers,
Broken Arrow and True Romance for Slater, these two
actors were certainly on the rise.
However, Hollywood is a fickle old town and after a few duds like Boat Trip and Norbit for Gooding and a stint in prison for Slater they have both
fallen down the pecking order of in demand actors. As in no one really has any demand for them these days. So to approach Sacrifice with
trepidation is wise.

After his wife
and daughter are killed, because his cover is blown within a drug ring,
detective John Hebron (Cuba Gooding Jr)
has turned to alcohol. The booze
doesn’t stop him being a decent cop but he has little regard for the rules. Confiding
only in his wife’s priest Father Porter (Christian
Slater) the two form an unlikely friendship. But with a drug cartel using religious statues to smuggle
drugs into the country the two find themselves thrown together. One of the dealers is looking for a way out and to protect
his sister he leaves her on Hebron’s doorstep. Oh and he’s left one of
the statues in Porter’s church. With
Hebron tasked with looking after the little tyke, she’s an easy
replacement for his dead sprog, the pieces are set for a show-down with the
drug dealers.

The good news is
Gooding Jr and Slater are not the worst things in Sacrifice. In fact they’re probably the best
things in it. Everything else is
an utter catastrophe. The script
wants to be a gritty crime thriller but comes off laughably clichéd. The villains are so stereotypical you wonder
how they are not led by a man with an eye patch speaking with a German
accent. Add to this an attempted
booming soundtrack so intrusive the only purpose it serves is to drown out the
mess of a story.

But what really
irks is casting Gooding Jr and Slater and barely using them. They’re essentially the protagonists of
the film and yet they’re only in about a third of the running time. The rest of the story is spent tracking
the inept villains who make Dr. Evil
look like a veritable genius. Zion Lee, playing the arch villain’s
son, so the Seth Green role to Dr.
Evil, spends the entire film shouting his lines in such a manner to make you
wonder if he suffers from a form of deafness to his own voice.

Add to the fact
director Damian Lee often shoots
scenes from angles that offer no coverage or emotion and you’re left
dumbfounded by the entire enterprise.
The opening and closing of the film offer us statistics on the drug
trade in the USA. Such things as
America will spend over $50 Billion on the war on drugs and how the drug trade
from Afghanistan has risen by 53% since the US invaded the country. Whether true or not these stats are the
most interesting part of Sacrifice and have no relevance to the film. You’d be better offering yourself to a
pagan god than you would watching Sacrifice.