La critique de James Berardinelli (part1)
A Life Less Ordinary, the latest collaboration from the Trainspotting/Shallow Grave team (director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge, producer Kevin MacDonald, and star Ewan McGregor), is a movie less ordinary. And that's part of its problem. The film is so focused on being quirky and unusual that it turns into a cliché of everything offbeat. From start to finish, A Life Less Ordinary feels like a group of sometimes amusing, sometimes clever, and sometimes tedious skits forced to fit together.
The film is part romantic comedy, part caper movie, and part road movie. In fact, it's a lot like True Romance with the violence toned down. Or, if you prefer, Excess Baggage meets Raising Arizona. Still, while there's a lot to admire about A Life Less Ordinary, chief of which is its daring, I found myself sitting through the film thinking that I should have been getting more out of it -- I wasn't laughing hard enough at the comic bits, gripping the seat arms tightly enough during the exciting parts, or smiling enough during the idiosyncratic sequences. Frankly, although I admire the craft that Boyle displays in his first studio effort (which is much like the technique he previously showed in Shallow Grave and Trainspotting), the film left me cool and strangely dissatisfied.
The film starts off in Boyle's satiric version of heaven, where everything is gloriously white, but God has decided to execute some new corporate strategies. It seems that the angels haven't been doing their jobs very well when it comes to bringing men and women together for lifelong commitments, so, using Gabriel (Dan Hedaya) as the bearer of bad tidings,the Big Man decides to implement a few new "incentive schemes" The first pair to work under these conditions are O'Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo), who are sent to Earth to bring together a janitor named Robert (Ewan McGregor) and a spoiled heiress named Celine (Cameron Diaz). If they fail, they stay in permanent exile. That's the incentive.
As things develop, Robert and Celine meet when he kidnaps her as a form of revenge against her father (Ian Holm), who fired him. But Robert, an all-around nice guy who is in over his head, doesn't have a clue what to do with a hostage, and Celine, who starts out giving him lessons in "Kidnapping 101", ends up running the show. Of course, as time passes, we recognize that their heated arguments are hiding a deeper, more lasting emotion. Meanwhile, O'Reilly and Jackson, desperate to get back to heaven, show up as a couple of bounty hunters who begin to get ideas that, if they're stuck on Earth, maybe stealing the ransom might be a good way to spend their permanent exile in style.
