Adam Mahler (adammahler1)

Financial problems kept this film from being finished, but the rough cut as released in 1997 is a great B-movie. The editing is scrappy, the zoom work makes soft dramatic punches without the beauty of movement you find in Peckinpah, and there are a few panning shots that bore the eye (and a few more that are brilliant). The movie is not in real time, as some critics have reported, but some sequences seem to be.

The horror-show car ride means to but does not show the depths of human degeneration as effectively as Deliverance or The Last House on the Left, in which the seasoned homicidal maniacs despoiled pure innocence to such an extent, they had to wash up. There's no image of innocence here, except a sleeping child, shown in close-ups that would fit in the melodramas of D.W. Griffith. But the subtext here is not as much about human evil or human animalism, as it is about capitalism, opportunity and communal authority.

If you pay attention to the small details of Backy, Poli and Cucciolla's performances, you learn a lot about becoming unconfident when crossing lines of conduct or seeing them crossed -- what it can do to anyone, from the career criminal to the middle-class working man. Standards of behavior, social decency, is important in this movie, but more important is how one remains calm when he sees any of his standards bent toward the breaking point.

Hypermedia spy story -- "What is real in the world? What/who can I trust?" -- is actually a thin veil for a doomed romance story: "Is my love real or an illusion? And BTW, could virtue, mine or maybe hers, have saved me from illusion?"

Unlike Alphaville, I never get the flickering sense that this world, jerryrigging pieces of the present to represent the future, is a real place. Instead, this move plays like vignettes in an off-Broadway play about the future, with monitors showing tinted surveillance footage next to the stage.

Walken creates a real, whole character out of verbal pirouettes around cliches; Dafoe is more than believable in the mute, physical acting required by a sustained flashback montage; and Argento is more of an underwritten cipher than she is mysterious. Her part in the con, as a surefire seductress, we have to take on faith. With the elliptical editing and blacked-out backgrounds, they could stuff anything in the plot, but they don't. The fact that the movie stays together, as does Walken and Dafoe's goldminers' pact, keeps things intriguing enough. We want to know exactly how everybody is going to commit suicide by Fate.