Thursday, October 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Boogie lite

Wonderland doesn't rise to the occasion

By Mike Prevatt

The marketing people have made it very clear that Wonderland depicts late porn star John Holmes. Why? Let's not kid ourselves: We're talking the most famous 13.5 inches in movie history. You waited almost three hours for it in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (based loosely on Holmes' rise and fall), and you'll anticipate it here too.

You'll also save time and money by procuring a commemorative issue of Inches magazine instead. Val Kilmer, who plays Holmes as a skittish and demoralized burnout, does not expose any penis, prosthetic or real. But this isn't why you should avoid Wonderland. Director James Cox (Highway) incorporates every drug movie cliché--from the amphetamine-fueled, quick-cut editing style of Spun to Boogie Nights' narcotic-addled descent into violence--while trying to visually stylize this '70s glamorama as if he were Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino. More care with the muddy, nonlinear narrative would have been preferable.

We first see Holmes as he trades his adult film career for a cocaine habit. His dealers are three untrustworthy scumbags out to rob a local kingpin (Eric Bogosian), and Holmes is a two-timing accessory to both sides, arguably inciting a 1981 bloodbath named (for the avenue in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon where it took place), the "Wonderland murders." The rest of the movie centers on determining Holmes' role in the fracas, but you could hardly care at this point. The only character worth sympathizing with is Holmes' estranged wife, played ably by Lisa Kudrow. Kilmer doesn't necessarily solicit pity, but the charisma he exhibited as Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday doesn't surface here. The rest of the cast are just drug-addled caricatures.

Wonderland feels like a bigger spectacle than it really is, but, as they say, it's not the size of the boat that counts, but the motion of the ocean.