Financial Times (London,England)

May 20, 1993, Thursday

A cut in the wrong direction

By STEPHEN AMIDON

THE ABYSS: SPECIAL EDITION (12)

James Cameron

NOWHERE TO RUN (15)

Robert Harmon

PASSENGER 57 (15)

Kevin Hooks

I WAS ON MARS (15)

Dani Levy
When it was first released in 1989, The Abyss was a half hour away from being a very strong movie indeed. Its writer and director, James Cameron, seems to have realised something was amiss and has now used the clout he has garnered from making Terminator 2 to have the movie released in a special edition, or director’s cut. The idea is that the decision of his studio’s marketing people to alter the film to make it more audience friendly is thereby reversed. Unfortunately, Cameron’s final version is a half hour longer than the original, when what the film always needed was to be a half hour shorter.

For those who missed it in its first incarnation, The Abyss portrays a group of likeable redneck divers whose underwater oil rig is commandeered by the US navy to rescue a sunken nuclear sub. Matters are complicated by the fraught marital relationship between the chief divers (Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the insanity of the navy commander (Michael Biehn), a looming hurricane, encroaching Russians and, finally, a colony of underwater aliens. It was the last ingredient that ruined the recipe the first time around, transforming what might have been a taut, sweaty adventure flick into a ludicrous fantasy feature.
Unfortunately, Cameron’s new version expands on this very aspect of the film, further padding out his picture with a tendentious morality play in which world war III is averted by these squishy ETs when they unleash giant tsunamis on the superpowers to make them put their nuclear weapons away. The resulting blend of dated and simplistic cold war politics, overwhelming special effects and sentimentality thoroughly undermines the two hours of skillful action and suspense that preceded it, forcing one into the rather alarming conclusion that those chop-happy studio executives might not be so purblind after all.
Cameron’s special edition also calls into question the whole recent trend of director’s cuts, which, with the exception of last year’s restored Blade Runner, seems to be little more than yet another way Hollywood is trying to have its cake and eat it too. After all, film-making is a collaborative process. What does the future hold – actor’s cuts? cinematographer’s cuts? The only thing you can be sure of is that the studios and the producers will certainly be getting their cuts, both times around.
If there were such a thing as an audience cut, Nowhere to Run would be five minutes long. One minute for the amount of time Rosanna Arquette spends naked, the other four devoted to Jean-Claude Van Damme as he ruptures the spleens and deviates the septums of various baddies with his vaunted martial arts. As for the remainder of the film, it is hard to see who the makers had in mind as potential viewers when they consigned it to celluloid.
The plot, such as it is, has Van Damme playing an escaped con who holes up on the farm belonging to a noble widow (Arquette) being threatened by greedy real estate developers. After the obligatory rocky start to their relationship, Van Damme and Arquette soon fall into the sack and then join forces to see off the bad guys.
Nowhere to Run is the latest step in the effort to domesticate the Belgian bruiser. As such, it is a resounding failure. Unlike Schwarzenegger or Willis, Van Damme is utterly lacking in charisma, his bland stoicism failing to suggest anything other than, well, bland stoicism. He is unable to humanise his macho antics with the sort of self-deprecating wit needed to break free of the straight-to-video category. To makes matters worse, his toned down and surprisingly lacklustre fighting here should prove a disappointment to his regular core of fans. And as for Arquette, it is sad to see this once promising actress reduced to playing little more than bearnaise sauce to Van Damme’s slab of beef.
It is easy to see why a video star wants to go upmarket. What is harder to figure out is why the fine film actor Wesley Snipes wants to travel in the opposite direction. After a series of roles that put him well on the way to becoming one of the most popular black leading men of all time, Snipes finds himself up in the air in Passenger 57, a hackneyed action movie that might have given even Van Damme pause.
The story has Snipes playing a former cop turned airline security consultant who locks horns with a ‘sophisticated British aristocrat’ (Bruce Payne) who also happens to be a lunatic with a penchant for blowing up 747s. What results is so laughably ill-conceived that you keep on expecting Snipes’s agent to burst out of one of the hijacked plane’s toilets and force the whole thing to make an emergency landing. Unfortunately, it keeps on going right up to the bloody finale, in which, ironically, Snipes fights with far more aplomb that the new model Van Damme.
I Was on Mars is the story of Silva (Maria Schrader), a young Polish woman who arrives in New York with plenty of dollars but apparently little in the way of motivation or common sense. She wanders aimlessly about the city for a few days, only to be relieved of her cash by Alio (Dani Levy), a slick con man with a line of patter only someone fresh off the boat could buy. Not one to take this sort of thing lying down, Silva decides to pursue Alio, soon involving herself in his bizarre existence and exacting a subtle yet telling revenge.
Fans of Stranger Than Paradise and Johnny Suede will find themselves on familiar turf here, though the film lacks the bizarre sublimity of those two efforts. Director Levy has a wonderful eye for detail – Silva carries an iron in her briefcase but only one change of clothes, while Alio garnishes his cocktails with Twinkies. And Schrader’s Silva is a memorable creation, a woman who uses passivity as a weapon more effective than anything the men she finds herself among can employ. But the film fails to establish a consistent comic pitch, undermining its fine observation and characterisation with an unevenness worsened by a tendency to indulge in weirdness for its own sake.