Faces In The Crowd

By Shelley Marsden – Never before has a film so eloquently displayed all the ingredients necessary for the “straight to DVD” category.

Never before has a
film so eloquently displayed all the ingredients necessary for the “straight to
DVD” category. Faces In the Crowd is a painstakingly slow-moving ‘thriller’
in which Milla Jovovich plays primary
school teacher Anna (complete with dowdy long skirt).

Following
a near miss on her way home one night with a serial killer known as ‘Tearjerk
Jack’, she develops a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. It
means she can’t recognise people’s faces – not even that of her long-term
boyfriend, Brice. Jeez, he could be the killer for all we know!

Anna
can’t identify the man that almost sent her to meet her maker, and so a very
childish cat and mouse game begins as she tries other ways of living with her
confusing condition – though, as one of her friends, a Samatha in Sex and the City wanabee points out, it
certainly makes for some fun in the bedroom department. Quite.

It
would be mean-spirited to go into any great detail about why this film doesn’t
work. Firstly we’d be here all day and secondly, if you ignore its glaring
ineptitude on every level, it’s actually fun.

Get beyond the formulaic plot and
the hilarious fake tan and painted-on eyebrows of Julian McMahon who plays the gruff ‘good cop’ (but resembles a 70s
porn star), it’s a giggle. He’s unrecognisable as the guy from Nip/Tuck. Quite
incredible.

As
for Milla Jovovich, she couldn’t add depth to a role if Tearjerk Jack had her duck-taped
to a chair and her life depended on it. She may have looked cool as Leeloo in The Fifth Element, but Luc Besson is no fool – she was playing
a ROBOT.

One can only hope Magnat was on
some kind of psychedelic substance when he came up with this – your average
episode of ‘Colombo’ is more believable.