On paper this looks like a good idea - a film about the pioneer pornographic film-making brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell, starring film-star brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. There might well have been a great film made out of the story, but the finished product simply lacks a governing intelligence with anything dramatically exciting or insightful to say about the tale.
Estevez directs from a script to which three writers are credited. The piece takes a very formulaic television bio-movie approach to its subject matter. We begin at the end, with Artie threatening to kill Jim, then zap back to their boyhood and then forwards in chronological order through their establishing themselves in the adult movie business, battling for their 5th amendment right to make and exhibit their films, hit big time with the feature Behind the Green Door, stand up to the mob, get over-ambitious in their film-making and fall to pieces through drinks, drugs and broken relationships. Jim manages to pull himself together but Artie goes off the rails, and ironically Jim ends up shooting his errant brother dead.
There's an attempt to show that the brothers learned the value of sorting out problems with a gun early on, although this is never linked to the wider gun culture in American (an approach which might have been intriguing). The final scenes are emotionally affecting but too much of the film plods by and left this viewer with a feeling that both the milieu had been better portrayed and the techniques better utilized elsewhere. The film lacks the epic feel of a descent into the pit which makes Boogie Nights so powerful; the flashy cutting, integration of music and showy set pieces all feel a bit second-hand - Scorsese, MTV, even Spielberg circa Jaws are referenced but apart from an impressive tracking shot following one of the wives from one brother in the swimming pool to another sniffing coke upstairs, nothing ever flies out of the screen - it remains steadfastly movie-of-the-week stuff.
The problem is perhaps ultimately in the subject matter: porn films have such a visceral effect with their meat shots and money shots that unless we are actually going to go there and see those things, it is very difficult to convey the intensity of the environment in a non-porn drama. Boogie Nights managed it through the quality and originality of the writing, acting and film-making; everything in Rated X is perfectly respectable (perhaps that is part of the issue?), but nothing really powerful or astonishing occurs. Nothing more is to be gained from the film than reading the short wikipedia entry on the Mitchell Brothers, and imagining better films like Boogie Nights and The People Vs Larry Flint.
Estevez directs from a script to which three writers are credited. The piece takes a very formulaic television bio-movie approach to its subject matter. We begin at the end, with Artie threatening to kill Jim, then zap back to their boyhood and then forwards in chronological order through their establishing themselves in the adult movie business, battling for their 5th amendment right to make and exhibit their films, hit big time with the feature Behind the Green Door, stand up to the mob, get over-ambitious in their film-making and fall to pieces through drinks, drugs and broken relationships. Jim manages to pull himself together but Artie goes off the rails, and ironically Jim ends up shooting his errant brother dead.
There's an attempt to show that the brothers learned the value of sorting out problems with a gun early on, although this is never linked to the wider gun culture in American (an approach which might have been intriguing). The final scenes are emotionally affecting but too much of the film plods by and left this viewer with a feeling that both the milieu had been better portrayed and the techniques better utilized elsewhere. The film lacks the epic feel of a descent into the pit which makes Boogie Nights so powerful; the flashy cutting, integration of music and showy set pieces all feel a bit second-hand - Scorsese, MTV, even Spielberg circa Jaws are referenced but apart from an impressive tracking shot following one of the wives from one brother in the swimming pool to another sniffing coke upstairs, nothing ever flies out of the screen - it remains steadfastly movie-of-the-week stuff.
The problem is perhaps ultimately in the subject matter: porn films have such a visceral effect with their meat shots and money shots that unless we are actually going to go there and see those things, it is very difficult to convey the intensity of the environment in a non-porn drama. Boogie Nights managed it through the quality and originality of the writing, acting and film-making; everything in Rated X is perfectly respectable (perhaps that is part of the issue?), but nothing really powerful or astonishing occurs. Nothing more is to be gained from the film than reading the short wikipedia entry on the Mitchell Brothers, and imagining better films like Boogie Nights and The People Vs Larry Flint.