Web posted on:
Friday, February 26, 1999 2:13:27 PM EST

By Reviewer Paul Clinton

(CNN) -- We have good news and bad news. The good news is that Warner Brothers came to its senses and put the new "Superman" film on hold. Nicolas Cage as the man of steel? What were they thinking!? That left Cage free for another project.

More good news: The "Batman" franchise is also on hold -- there is a higher power -- which frees up director Joel Schumacher. The bad news? Freed from their other projects, the pair decided to make "Eight Millimeter."

Cage plays a mild-mannered everyman who happens to be a private eye, or in this case a "surveillance specialist," named Tom Welles. Welles is balancing life between work and his family -- a wife, played woodenly by Catherine Keener, and an infant daughter.

But when he's hired by a billionaire's widow, who found an 8mm so-called "snuff film" in her dead husband's safe, his life is turned upside-down. She wants him to find out if the film is real and if the girl "murdered" in the movie is really dead. (Snuff films, which the FBI and pornographers themselves say are urban myths, are movies in which someone is actually killed in cold blood on camera.)

Of course, in this case, the film is very real and the girl is really dead. Otherwise, there'd be no movie. Now our hero becomes obsessed with finding the killers of this girl he's never met and stopping them before they can "snuff" again.

Welles starts his investigation by trying to uncover the identity of the girl. This leads him to Hollywood (of course) and a tour of the underground world of hard-core pornography. Along the way he joins forces with Max, a porn shop clerk and unofficial tour guide to sleaze (now wouldn't that be a nice addition to the Universal Studios tour?).

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As Max, Joaquin Phoenix adds a nice element of black humor to the film. He serves up lines such as "You name the vice, I'll name the price" and "There are only three rules in life. Number one, there is always a victim, number two, don't be the victim, and I forget number three."

For the first half-hour or so, this film actually works fairly well.

Then it proceeds to fall apart in big chunks.

Schumacher, who began his career as a department store window dresser, continues to have a wonderful eye for detail and a fantastic visual sensibility that make his movies unique. Maybe if you turned off the sound and just looked at the pictures, it would be a better movie.

But he gets way too caught up in using symbolism, to the point where it gets a little silly. For example, Welles has to walk through a meat market to get to where the porn movies are shot -- we get it, Joel.

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who brought us the film "Seven" (another creepy, dark film), has crafted a muddled script that occasionally slips into the realm of "say what?" There's one place in the movie where the dialogue and the situation are so ludicrous they elicited a unified groan from my fellow audience members.

But the major reason this film ultimately fails is miscasting. Cage's character is an average joe who is pulled into this horrifying world. Cage can play many things, but average joe isn't one of them. Cage was born with an edge a mile wide. I would love to see what Tom Hanks or even Kevin Costner would do with this role.

"Eight Millimeter" wants to be both an edgy dark film about a forbidden subject and at the same time a big glossy, commercial Hollywood production. It's a little bit of both and a whole lot of neither.

Schumacher had told press types that he cut substantial pieces of this movie out to keep it from getting an NC-17 rating. "Eight Millimeter" is rated R with a running time of 126 minutes.