FEELING MINNESOTA (25)

Directed by: Steven Baigelman

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, Vincent D'Onofrio

The Pitch: A young woman is forcibly married to an unpleasant gangster but rescued, temporarily at least, by his estranged younger brother.

Theo Sez: A good writer serving a strong story is the ideal, but even a good writer showing off - as in TO DIE FOR or THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD - can be fun ; a bad writer showing off, however, is nothing but trouble. Nothing in this tired ripoff of better indies rings remotely true, nor is it supposed to : from its plot strand about disposing of a corpse, to the absurdly thin-skinned characters - forever pulling guns and beating each other up - to the rhythm of casual four-letter words, to the notion of soft-faced Keanu as a hardened jailbird, to the unpleasant cop played in you'll-never-guess-who fashion by Dan Aykroyd, it's aiming squarely for the mixture of offbeat humour and swaggering Attitude that currently defines "hip" (at least in its Tarantino version). It has a certain texture, if only because it's all of a piece - at least it's not a bad committee of writers showing off - but it's so relentlessly shallow and misconceived you barely know where to begin in discussing it : it's like the feeling when your teenage cousin shyly shows you her romantic poetry and asks you to "be honest". One thing's for sure : without a saving wit - the breath of humanism that Tarantino brings to his own movies - quirky is indistinguishable from annoying, and unpredictable narratives shade easily into incomprehensible ones. What little there is of a show is stolen by one Michael Rispoli, in a peripheral role as a hen-pecked motel-owner.