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USA 2015
Directed by
Mark Christopher
116 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Andrew Lee
3.5 stars

54 (Director's Cut)

Synopsis: Dumb but good-looking Shane O’Shea dreams of leaving the ‘burbs and living the high life in Manhattan. Convincing his friends to try their luck getting into 54, the hottest nightclub around, the slimy owner Steve Rubell (Mike Meyers) gets him to take his shirt off and lets him in. Soon he’s a busboy, walking around in silk shorts and not much else serving New York’s elite, in more ways than one.

I never saw the 1998 studio cut of 54, I just remember hearing about how it was a butchery of a far better film. I’m curious now to know just how bad it was, because while the director’s cut is a solid film, it’s deeply flawed. There are some excellent performances, but multiple plot threads go nowhere in particular, and the whole thing feels a bit of a mess, albeit for the most part, a good mess.

Taken as a kind of mood piece to describe a point in time, 54 is entertaining, but it’s also lacking subtlety. The predatory way that Shane is used by the rich as a personal plaything, passed around as a sex toy and object of mockery is a starting point for what promises to be an exploration of debauchery and the rich eating the poor. But it never gets very far beyond that. There’s a potentially interesting subplot involving Shane’s housemate, Anita (Salma Hayek), who wants to become a disco singer and keeps trying to get various music producers involved, but they’re more interested in her body, but again it never gets very far. The whole motivation for Shane to get into 54 is his dream of meeting Julie Black (Neve Campbell) a soap-star he’s got the hots for. There’s a brief scene towards the end where he finally meets and connects with her, and then he’s done. That’s the story of the film, lots of things thrown up in the air, but very rarely resolved in anything resembling an interesting way.

And yet, it’s strangely compelling. There are entertaining vignettes, and characters like the drugged-up disco grandma that are just make you smile. The way the vibe of the times is captured is striking, but it’s less the vibe of the 70s and more the vibe of 90s indie filmmaking. Remember when Pulp Fiction became a blockbuster? 54 is a film born of those times, where oddball independent cinema went mainstream for better and for worse. And this is both better and worse than a lot of what we see these days. But it’s an interesting monument to a time when studios were willing to take chances on unusual material, and in this case, lost their bottle and tried to reshape what they had, to their commercial detriment. I don’t know if this cut would have done that much better, it’s still a flawed compendium  of interesting ideas. We’ll never know. But it’s nice that the director finally got to put his vision out to the world.

 

 

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