15 Minutes

Although it looks sharp, “15 Minutes” is a confused movie that never really makes up its mind about what it wants to be. Writer-Director John Herzfeld (whose most prominent picture to date was the “Pulp Fiction” wannabe “2 Days in the Valley”) may have intended to craft a withering look at the corrupting influence of the media in 21st Century America, but he winds up with a rather routine cop melodrama which falls victim to poorly written characters and an unconvincing plot. I suspect that Herzfeld may actually be a good director. He shows flashes of visual style in “15 Minutes” and manages some tricky sequences adroitly. (It is hard to tell from his work so far if he is any good with actors.) But he is too enamored of his own script here, including the weak sections, and the picture goes on too long. Perhaps he should seek out material written by someone else. Named after Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” “15 Minutes” concerns Oleg (Taktarov) and Emil (Roden), two lowlifes from eastern Europe who visit New York and begin a series of brutal murders. Oleg is a genial but stupid thug who dreams of being a film director, and Emil is a cunning and ruthless psychopath.

The murders are really related to an old debt, but Emil concocts a scheme to sell film footage of their crimes to the media. He then plans to beat the criminal justice system by mounting an insanity defense. Or something like that. He gets these ideas from watching “Top Story,” a tabloid show hosted by the unctuous Robert Hawkins (Grammer), who actually says at one point, in another homage to quotations everyone has heard already, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Emil and Oleg find themselves up against Eddie Flemming (De Niro), New York’s very own celebrity homicide detective. De Niro shows us nothing new in this performance; he could have mailed it in. (There is a scene in which he is practicing his marriage proposal in front of a mirror. I kept waiting for him to start yelling “You talkin’ to me?” It might have helped if he had.) De Niro is probably incapable of giving a bad performance, but he is certainly capable of getting stuck with a badly written and directed part.

Still, the role of Flemming is a fountain of nuance compared to that of Jordy Warsaw, played by the likeable Edward Burns. Jordy, who is of Polish descent (I suppose that’s why his last name is Warsaw) is a fire marshal (and fire marshals, we are told in a rather pedestrian and completely unbelievable bit of expository dialogue, can do everything a cop can do). He meets up with Flemming over a couple of charred corpses, and faster than you can say “cop movie cliché” the two have teamed up to solve the murders. So now we have one of the hoariest conventions of the cop genre, the tough, older veteran teaming up with the idealistic and slightly naive rookie. (Flemming actually calls Jordy “kid” at one point, which is a pet peeve of mine.) (Speaking of clichés, Jordy is also saddled with a by-the-book boss who yells at Jordy a lot for his unconventional behavior.) The difference, though (and it’s not nearly enough), is that the rookie in this case is a fire marshal. There is no particularly good reason for this to be so.

A sequence late in the picture does involve a fire, so it appears that Jordy has been cast as a fireman in order to support a scene the sole purpose of which is to allow him to use his firefighting skills. That kind of circular scripting, rather than adding texture to the picture, actually winds up being a distraction. Jordy himself never rises above the level of a cardboard cutout. We never get to know or care about him, and it is hard to sympathize when he goes slightly off the deep end. It is also not at all clear why he gets so fixated on avenging Flemming, a man he knew personally for all of about two days. (Yes, Flemming dies, in a violent and heroic fashion. This is too bad, because De Niro, despite the poor role, has more energy than anyone else in the movie.) “15 Days” has too many half-baked ideas like this. There is a subplot involving Flemming’s relationship with a beautiful reporter (Kanakaredes), that goes nowhere. There is another thread hinting at Warsaw’s apparent attraction to a pretty young witness, but it, too, flickers across the screen and vanishes.

It appears that Herzfeld was attempting a scathing indictment of America’s media obsession and the craven quest for ratings that mark the current scene, a kind of “Network” of cop movies. Instead, he is reduced to taking potshots at tabloids and trashy TV talk shows (Roseanne offers her show up for crucifixion). At the end of the picture, Jordy actually takes a poke at the sleazy TV newsman Hawkins. If one punch is supposed to represent the American public’s rage at the media’s wholesale manipulation, it’s pretty small potatoes. Nice try. Kid. (3/12/2001)