No substance to Side Effects

Side Effects
DIRECTED BY: Steven
Soderbergh
STARRING: Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones
CERT: 15A

Steven Soderbergh won an Oscar in 2001 for Traffic, a fine film about the American government’s so-called war on drugs. He gets stuck into some strong medicine again in Side Effects, this time taking aim at a far more lucrative drug trade, on which there will be no such war any time soon. A welcome endeavour, though he doesn’t quite hit the target with this shot.
In the opening scene, there’s blood on the floor, the kind of blood that tends to mean something uglier than a paper cut.
That something will be revealed after a little trip to the past, where Emily (Mara) is greeting her husband Martin (Tatum) after his release from prison. He’s done four years for insider trading, if you can buy the idea of Magic Mike on Wall Street.
Back at home, Emily sinks into depression and, after an apparent suicide attempt, ends up in hospital under the care of psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Law). When the standard drugs don’t work, he puts her on an experimental new anti-psychotic called Ablixa, after consulting her previous doctor, Victoria Siebert (Zeta-Jones).
Apart from the usual suspects – dizziness, headache, nausea, rash, shortness of breath, deep vein thrombosis, stroke and death – the new drug’s side effects are largely unknown but are soon to become clear.
For Emily, they include extreme zombification, sudden violent tendencies and finding herself charged with murder. Doctor Banks – his career and marriage heading for the dump – decides to get to the bottom of the mess. That’s when it all gets, well, messy.
Side Effects appears to start out with Big Medicine in its sights, Soderbergh perhaps having a go at the pharmaceutical industry, tackling the big issue of prescription drugs and maybe even depression. Lord knows there’s a fine film to be made there, on how crooked fortunes are being made on the sick. But Soderbergh and his writer Scott Z Burns handle that ball with all the skill and care of an Irish rugby player. Just when things are looking good, they drop it.
What starts as a decent drama soon becomes a schizophrenic thriller, with sex, death and revenge and all sorts of mad double-crossing thrown into the mix, until eventually it’s a big many-headed beast that can’t be made sense of. Not by me, anyway.
Soderbergh’s defenders will point out how slick and stylish it all looks, how nicely crafted it is, how smooth. They’ll be right, but all the flair in the world won’t fix a butchered story – especially when you get the feeling it’s butchered on purpose, when the director doesn’t give a hoot if you can understand what’s going on and who’s doing what to whom and why and how many more plot twists do we have to endure?
The film’s one other plus is Jude Law, whose shrink turns out to be central character in the story, the likeable chap in a world of sharks, though he might have a few hidden teeth of his own.
His charms, however, and Soderbergh’s undoubted skills, can carry this only so far. The director says this is his last film and, if that’s anything more than just a huff, it will be a shame to bow out on such an off note.

Oz the Great and Powerful
DIRECTED BY: Sam Raimi
STARRING: James Franco, Michelle
Williams, Rachel Weisz, Mila Kunis
CERT: PG

Riddle me this: How does a great director like Sam Raimi combine the charms of Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis and make a film that’s so, well, hmmm, blah? That in itself is a stunning achievement.
It’s tempting to say it’s because he’s put them in a movie whose leading man is the charisma black hole known as James Franco. In fairness, that’s not a good move to begin with. But I suppose the real reason Oz doesn’t do the trick is the same reason Raimi’s Spider-Man movies stopped working – too much razzle dazzle and not enough soul. Or put another way, like a certain tin hero who may be familiar to fans of the Oz stories, it just doesn’t have a heart.
Cobbling together various strands of the books by L Frank Baum, Raimi has concocted an origins story for The Wizard of Oz, putting Dorothy and Toto and their beloved buddies right up there with, um, Batman.
It’s Kansas, 1905 and huckster magician Oscar Diggs (Franco) is legging it after an encounter with the wrong lady. His getaway hot air balloon meets the business end of a tornado and winds up in a strange new world of blinding colour and magnificent creatures – though the munchkin population has clearly not exploded yet.
Despite looking like a Jack the Ripper’s even creepier brother, Oscar is immediately hailed as the messiah, the one of whom it was prophesied. Good witch Glinda (Williams) believes he is the chap who will save the land and its good citizens from the wicked witch Evanora (Weisz) and her pretty evil sister Theodora (Kunis). But even the messiah (a very naughty boy, if ever I saw one) must tread the yellow brick road, along with his new disciples – a flying monkey called Finley (voiced by Zach Braff) and a broken china doll (with the voice of Joey King) that the magic saviour has mended.
As an adventure yarn, Oz the Great and Powerful will probably go down well with the kids. Though it never looks less than spectacular and has the added appeal of not being a musical, older audiences may not be so impressed.
I foresee many viewers making a point to renew acquaintances with a certain scarecrow and a cowardly lion, just to be reminded of how it’s really done.