Strange Days Review

Set in the days, hours, minutes and even milliseconds leading up to midnight on New Year's Eve, 1999, Kathryn Bigelow's sci-fi romantic thriller begins as a brilliant if savage satire on life in Los Angeles.

This is a near and very nasty future, beyond Blade Runner. What we think of as symbols of the mean streets today - the riots, arsonists' fires, Rodney King's driving debacle, O.J.'s media extravaganza, racists in the LAPD - are played into a symphony of relentless violence that is both boggling and believable. Which is frightening.

In James Cameron's screenplay, pop culture technology has turned the violence into a black market spectator sport in which perverts record sex acts and ghouls record their robberies, rapes and murders. They sell the recording discs to depraved voyeurs who play them back on miniature `virtual reality' machines.

Cruel humor keeps our interest on the characters while the background is a panorama of a society disintegrating. Music and ambient noise blast us constantly.

Ralph Fiennes, with dirty hair and leering grin, plays one of the sellers, an unsympathetic loser who is supposed to have a good heart buried in his savage breast. Fiennes turns in a bizarre but intriguing performance that teeters between his Nazi nightmare in Schindler's List and his moral quagmire as the lovable but weak genius in Quiz Show.

The real `man' in this movie is played by Angela Bassett, who not only is a rock of Gibraltar in the moral department but turns out to have fists of fury when the fighting starts. This actress is simply fabulous - raw, sexy, smart, strong, very feminine and totally empowered. She is Fiennes' ally, his salvation.

Performed way out on the edge by Fiennes, Bassett and the likes of sexpot Juliette Lewis and victimized Brigitte Bako, Strange Days explodes on screen with a visceral urgency and director Bigelow's lacerating visual and aural assault. The movie hits the cortex like shock therapy times 2000.

Which is great - or at least as captivating as witnessing a car wreck from inside the vehicle - for the first hour. Unfortunately, Strange Days is a lot, lot, lot longer, at a relentless two hours and 20 minutes.

The early promise of the film gives way to exploitation; satire mutates into drivel. Strange Days eats its own entrails. Emotionally, we are exhausted. We finally care less what happens to anyone and everyone on the screen, except Bassett.