Running, jumping, climbing trees…

Watching the disaster by Midnight Digital

Director: Jieho Lee Cast: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Forrest Whitaker, Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Emilie Hirsche, Julie Delpy

An extended exercise in awfulness

If such a place exists as ‘artists’ hell’, then that is the place to which the creators of The Air I Breathe should be banished, for eternity and a day. But before we let them leave, we should first boil them in a vat and steam them mercilessly into repentance over a mound of organic cabbages.

Perhaps I am getting a little excitable, but just how did it go so badly wrong? At first, the signs for The Air I Breathe were auspicious. Forest Whitaker, fresh from his triumphant portrayal of the petulant demagogue Idi Amin, was joined in the billing by Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser and Sarah Michelle Gellar. A young director, Jieho Lee offered the possibility of a fresh perspective and the tagline was alluring: ‘Sometimes the things we can’t change end up changing us.’

Ninety minutes later I wound up confused and disappointed. Set in a faceless ‘Gothamesque’ city, the plot had intended to portray snapshots of the grubby underbelly of American society through four separate, but interwoven mini dramas. These four vignettes had been drawn from a Chinese proverb that suggests that four emotional cornerstones characterise life: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love.

What ensued, however, was vapid and uninspiring. Grim, broke and laughing like a lunatic, the best actor of the lot, Forest Whittaker (Happiness), was despatched with alarming efficiency by Lee with the film just twenty five minutes old. Affording the Oscar winning actor just enough time to inexplicably squander $50,000 on a horse called ‘Butterfly’, because, ‘he likes butterflies.’

But before you can properly lament the fact that Happiness was not granted the slightest chance to justify his name, you are disturbed by the arrival of one of the most ludicrous cinematic inventions of modern times.

The character of Fingers, I presume, was devised as the film’s sinister, Machiavellian, villain: a money-driven mobster intended to make people’s knees shake like maracas. But the all-Italian, cool but dangerous, Noo Yawk Tawkin mafia boss is so clichéd that Andy Garcia, an elsewhere respectable actor, is successful only in conjuring a hilarious caricature.

For the entirety of the film he strutted about his patch, caught in an endless, tedious soliloquy, uttering nonsense about ‘biwsnus’ and ‘wrespect’, stopping only to shoot the occasional hapless victim with disquieting alacrity. Fittingly for a film that was as deep as a puddle, the origins of his name were equally glib: Fingers was so-called due to his predisposition to remove the odd digit with a rusty pair of scissors. Charming.

As the plot trundled forward, further ridiculous characters appeared, none worse than Fingers’ nephew Tony: a loquacious braggart in town with the intention of ‘popping his cherry.’ In a film fraught with unnecessary bloodletting, sadly Tony narrowly escaped a similarly grizzly fate, due only to Brendan Fraser’s useful ability to glimpse into the future.

With tragic inevitability things grew ever more depressingly bleak, with a succession of traffic accidents, attempted suicides and common assaults being thrown into the mix, before a flash of serendipity arrived to solve the all the tragic woes of the plot in a glorious stroke of fortune. Meanwhile Bacon and Gellar struggled admirably with the scraps, buoyed only by the presence of a creditable indie soundtrack and the odd sharply directed scene.

The Air I Breathe fails as a work of art on a spectacular number of levels. Attempting to straddle the void between an action flick, a morality tale and a slap stick comedy, it ends up suffering from an identity crisis of Clark Kent proportions. The characters are bland pastiches of something interesting, the stuff from which stereotypes sprout, and the script remains reassuringly awful throughout.

The only question that lingered was how this drivel escaped from the studio and weaved its way through post production without being apprehended at some point on route. At least, now that it has arrived, we can judge it for what it is: an ignominious failure, so bad that it is utterly unforgettable.