This is one of the great "Who gives a bleep!" movies of all time. Most of the film isn't really that bad, but it never gives you a reason to care what happens to any of characters or wonder how the story will turn out.
Sandra (Asia Argento) used to be a prostitute in love with rich and screwed up investment banker Miles (Michael Madsen). They used to have depraved sex and Miles also used Sandra to have sex with other businessmen to get inside information from them. That so-called relationship ended and now Sandra works for Lester and Sue Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), helping manage their import/export business. Sandra also works for herself, smuggling drugs inside the Wang's shipments and selling those drugs with the help of her apparent friend Lisa (Joanne Preiss). After one of Sandra's drug deals goes bad, Lester inexplicably shows up to help her out, somebody ends up dead and Sandra flees to Singapore, where someone else ends up dead and people try to kill her until a blonde (Kim Gordon) playing the part of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction shows up to solve all of Sandra's immediate problems.
This is an excruciatingly boring movie. If you're not fidgeting in your seat, wishing for it to be over before it's even halfway done, you'd have to be either stoned out of your mind or dead. But Boarding Gate isn't boring because the acting is flat or the plot is lame or anything like that. Most of the dialog is fairly ridiculous and there's a silly twist in the middle, but a lot of Oliver Assayas' work is fairly decent. The story is okay and the movie looks fine. None of the actors embarrass themselves, or anything like that. However, nothing that happens in this movie to any of the characters matters at all, because you don't care if they succeed or fail, live or die.
Sandra is the star of this story. She's the one we're supposed to identify with, the one we worry about when she's threatened or in danger. The movie, though, only defines her as a drug-dealing, former prostitute. We're given nothing else about Sandra and how she came to be this person. The film doesn't even seem to care if Sandra is good or bad. She's just the star and the audience is expected to care about her. I t's as though Assayas looked at Argento and was so blinded by what he saw, he thinks everyone else will be just as blind. I can see fine, though, and Argento's nothing special.
That applies to the other characters in the film as well. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin try hard to pump some genuine emotion into Lester and Sue, but it's so unconnected to anything in the story that it just makes Lester and Sue seem weird and overexcited. Miles is, essentially, Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen. If you like Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll enjoy his time on screen. If you want anything more than Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll be greatly disappointed.
There are three points where the movie tries to make us care about these people. Sandra and Miles have two unbelievably long and pointless scenes where they spout unmemorable and obviously contrived dialog at each other and Sandra and Sue have their own scene that's not quite as long but just as useless. I think the conversations are supposed to give us insight into these people but they really just dwell on a lot of the backstory to this movie and run over some exposition. These scenes tell us nothing about Sandra, Miles or Sue that isn't readily apparent from the moment we encounter them.
Argento goes topless at one point and rubs her crotch at another. Those moments make you think Boarding Gate is going to be one of those exploitive, sex-and-guns, late-night-cable thrillers. That's all the sex in the movie, though, and there's not much more violence. It's like Assayas thought he could take the script for a crude and prurient melodrama and "class it up" enough to make it a serious drama. He couldn't, which leaves this movie in a weird limbo. If you could relate to these characters as real people, you might be interested in what happens to them. But since you can't relate to them, all you can focus on is how the story manages to be both pretentious and uneventful.
Sandra (Asia Argento) used to be a prostitute in love with rich and screwed up investment banker Miles (Michael Madsen). They used to have depraved sex and Miles also used Sandra to have sex with other businessmen to get inside information from them. That so-called relationship ended and now Sandra works for Lester and Sue Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), helping manage their import/export business. Sandra also works for herself, smuggling drugs inside the Wang's shipments and selling those drugs with the help of her apparent friend Lisa (Joanne Preiss). After one of Sandra's drug deals goes bad, Lester inexplicably shows up to help her out, somebody ends up dead and Sandra flees to Singapore, where someone else ends up dead and people try to kill her until a blonde (Kim Gordon) playing the part of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction shows up to solve all of Sandra's immediate problems.
This is an excruciatingly boring movie. If you're not fidgeting in your seat, wishing for it to be over before it's even halfway done, you'd have to be either stoned out of your mind or dead. But Boarding Gate isn't boring because the acting is flat or the plot is lame or anything like that. Most of the dialog is fairly ridiculous and there's a silly twist in the middle, but a lot of Oliver Assayas' work is fairly decent. The story is okay and the movie looks fine. None of the actors embarrass themselves, or anything like that. However, nothing that happens in this movie to any of the characters matters at all, because you don't care if they succeed or fail, live or die.
Sandra is the star of this story. She's the one we're supposed to identify with, the one we worry about when she's threatened or in danger. The movie, though, only defines her as a drug-dealing, former prostitute. We're given nothing else about Sandra and how she came to be this person. The film doesn't even seem to care if Sandra is good or bad. She's just the star and the audience is expected to care about her. I t's as though Assayas looked at Argento and was so blinded by what he saw, he thinks everyone else will be just as blind. I can see fine, though, and Argento's nothing special.
That applies to the other characters in the film as well. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin try hard to pump some genuine emotion into Lester and Sue, but it's so unconnected to anything in the story that it just makes Lester and Sue seem weird and overexcited. Miles is, essentially, Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen. If you like Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll enjoy his time on screen. If you want anything more than Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll be greatly disappointed.
There are three points where the movie tries to make us care about these people. Sandra and Miles have two unbelievably long and pointless scenes where they spout unmemorable and obviously contrived dialog at each other and Sandra and Sue have their own scene that's not quite as long but just as useless. I think the conversations are supposed to give us insight into these people but they really just dwell on a lot of the backstory to this movie and run over some exposition. These scenes tell us nothing about Sandra, Miles or Sue that isn't readily apparent from the moment we encounter them.
Argento goes topless at one point and rubs her crotch at another. Those moments make you think Boarding Gate is going to be one of those exploitive, sex-and-guns, late-night-cable thrillers. That's all the sex in the movie, though, and there's not much more violence. It's like Assayas thought he could take the script for a crude and prurient melodrama and "class it up" enough to make it a serious drama. He couldn't, which leaves this movie in a weird limbo. If you could relate to these characters as real people, you might be interested in what happens to them. But since you can't relate to them, all you can focus on is how the story manages to be both pretentious and uneventful.