Cast: Rachel Weisz, Susan Lynch, Iain Glen, Maurice Roëves, Alex Norton, Tom Mannion
Director: Bill Eagles
Producers: Simon Donald, Alan J. Wands
Screenplay: Simon Donald
Cinematography: James Welland
Music: Murray Gold
U.S. Distributor: Universal Focus
If painful predictability was an asset, Beautiful Creatures would be a masterpiece. As it is, it's just another tired caper movie/black comedy that thinks it's a lot more clever than it actually is. The story takes us through a series of uninspired plot twists and turns that transport us to a destination we can see from the beginning. In any journey, getting there is supposed to be at least half the fun. The filmmakers behind Beautiful Creatures either forgot or ignored that simple maxim.
In the world of violent, testosterone-powered black comedies, director Bill Eagles clearly aspires to reach the heights of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but falls considerably short of his goal. One of the keys to success for this kind of movie is that the protagonists, no matter how grubby, grungy, and misanthropic they may be, have to be highly clever. They have to act smart and say all sorts of witty things. Nothing like that occurs in Beautiful Creatures. The dialogue is banal and the characters are irritatingly dumb. It's hard to be intrigued by (or sympathetic with) individuals whose primary personality trait seems to be permanent brain-lock. Admittedly, it's possible to make a motion picture with stupid characters, but not when the audience recognizes the truth while the filmmakers persist in thinking that their creations are hip and sassy.
The film stars Susan Lynch as Dorothy and a bleach-blond Rachel Weisz as Petula, two women who are bound together by what happens one night. Dorothy comes upon Petula being ruthlessly beaten and throttled by her out-of-control boyfriend, Brian (Tom Mannion). Deciding to intervene, Dorothy grabs the nearest available weapon - a heavy iron pipe - and bashes Brian over the head with it. He doesn't die immediately, but, by the next morning, he's a corpse. And, after Dorothy's dog (named Pluto, not Toto), takes a bite out of him, he's a corpse without a finger. Instead of just getting rid of the body, however, Dorothy and Petula concoct a scheme by which they will pretend Brian has been kidnapped and demand a ransom from his rich brother, Ronnie (Maurice Roëves). The investigating police officer (Alex Norton) figures out the scam, but decides to play along with it to his own advantage. Meanwhile, Ronnie thinks it's all an attempt to bilk money out of him, and that Brian is behind things. Throw in Dorothy's ex-boyfriend, Tony (Iain Glen), who has a fondness for heroin, golf clubs, guns, and knives, and things get messy in a hurry.
As I sat watching Beautiful Creatures, I kept waiting for it to do something truly daring or inventive. That moment never came. The movie has a plodding, disjointed feel, but, despite all of the supposed twists and turns in the story, it never manages to surprise its audience. There are occasional moments of humor to be found in some of the film's darker, more twisted jokes, but those are not good enough to speed up the pace of a film that seems strangely long, even though its running time is under 90 minutes. One of the film's lone points of interest is that it takes the unusual position of making women the leads. But, while Susan Lynch (Waking Ned Devine) and Rachel Weisz (The Mummy) both turn in credible performances, they are let down by the screenplay.
In the final analysis, Beautiful Creatures is a series of ill-conceived misjudgments. The tone is wildly inconsistent. At one point, there's a scene of girlfriend abuse that is startling in its unflinching depiction of brutality. Later, a woman is forced to inject herself with heroin. Yet, on another occasion, there's a lighthearted romp with lesbian overtones as the two leads playfully throw dirty underwear at each other. It takes a deft hand to blend such divergent elements - one that Eagles does not exhibit. The sequences seem to belong in different films. And Beautiful Creatures is not assembled with enough skill to encourage the suspension of disbelief necessary for viewers to ignore all of the plot holes and other contrivances. This leads to dissatisfaction with the basic framework - we want to flow with the storyline, not wonder why the ride is so choppy. This is a clumsy motion picture that, instead of moving forward, is caught in a pattern of perpetual circular motion. Or, to put it another way, it's a dog chasing its tail.
© 2001 James Berardinelli