Review of The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) by Steven B — 08 Jul 2009

I'm a big U2 fan and have owned the soundtrack to The Million Dollar Hotel for nine years before I finally got around to seeing it. It turns out that the music really is the best thing about the film.

Second best are the montage and establishing shots that the music plays over. This is only the third Wim Wenders film that I have seen after WIngs of Desire and its sequel Faraway, So Close. From what I've seen, one of his specialties is great cinematography.

Unfortunately, The Million Dollar Hotel starts out with a tedious script that just confounded me and made me uninterested. It's a shame because an impressive cast of character actors was assembled.

Individually they were pretty good and sometimes kind of amusing, but as a group it just looked like a garbled mess. Mel Gibson (as an oddball creep detective), Jimmy Smits, and Donal Logue, in particular just seemed really out of place.

Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies actually had good chemistry together, the problem was the the way mental illness that their characters suffered from was portrayed. Sometimes it was lain on very thick, and other times it was too subtle.

One line spoken by Davies makes us think that he is faking mental illness, but the way he continues to act impaired a few moments later, and the way his character goes toward his fate just contradicts this.

I'm just left scratching my head at the end and wondering why I bothered. At least I got some nice-though at times very odd-imagery to go with the music that I liked.