 • About the ratings • Write your own review • Back to main page ![[]](http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/06/93/06/image_6936.gif){kind=small} A talented cast apparently forgot how to act
By Omar Gallaga American-Statesman Staff Posted: August 1, 2003 If the kooky caper film "Scorched" is a "comedy," then so is selling insurance, watching cooking shows and staring straight into the sun. The film, which sits somewherebetween basic cable and straight-to-video, is slinking quietly into theaters today, likely through some sort of deal with a demon. Though it has a promising cast, the end result is an overly plotted mess that's badly acted, badly scripted and never more than a Heartslowing Work of Staggering Blandness. In the film, a small branch bank sits in the middle of an unspecified desert landscape in the American Southwest. Three bank employees, played by Alicia Silverstone (tarnished and dull years after her career high, "Clueless"), Woody Harrelson (crazed and with bad teeth for no good reason) and nebbish Paulo Costanzo decide independently to rob the bank on the same weekend. Each has his or herown motivations -- Silverstone was dumped by the bank manager, Harrelson is avenging the death of his pet duck's mother and Costanzo -- well, he's got a fast-talking brother who wants to make a big score in Vegas. The film starts at the end, after the three zany heists, and goes back to the beginning to show how three losers successfully sneaked money out of the Desert Savings Bank. "Scorched" exists in a seemingly modern world where banks have no running security cameras. (The cameras are only activated when an alarm goes off, Silverstone exposits awkwardly at one point in the film. Uh-huh.) It also exists in a humorless vacuum, a place of no local color where the main characters talk and talk and talk, but never reveal a thing about themselves. There's the nervous young kid, the bitter ex-girlfriend, the hunky fireman. They almost blend into the sandy landscape, a blinding wasteland infinitely more interesting than the scheming bankers in "Scorched." Is it a total loss? Not quite -- John Cleese rates the film's only chuckle as a rich bank customer who hilariously scares off a Girl Scout trying to sell him cookies. And Rachael Leigh Cook is nearly All That as a scrappy Dungeons & Dragons player who fantasizes about killing bosses in full "Xena: Warrior Princess" gear. (Though the joke is embarrassingly done twice in clumsy action sequences, Cook never fails to commit.) But everything else about the film is nearly unwatchable. Director Gavin Grazer frames the film neatly and moves things along efficiently, but the script by Joe Wein (who jokes in the press notes that he's never actually robbed a bank. We can tell, Joe. We can tell.) is exhausting and unfunny. Perhaps the desert sun fried the brains of everyone on the set of "Scorched," until they couldn't tell funny from annoying. | |||||||
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