How Peter Morgan got Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Ben Foster to see anything worthwhile in his script we'll never know.
360 is possibly the most pointless film of this year's London Film Festival and yet it's been inexplicably chosen to open it. It may star the flawless Anthony Hopkins, and the irritatingly good Jude Law alongside the generally reliable Rachel Weisz but it's a cliché ridden attempt at something existential that lacks substance.
It opens with a Slovakian sex worker babbling about forks in the road as she takes her clothes off for her online profile and wonders briefly how she reached this seminal moment. She's soon pimped out to Jude Law who has a crisis of conscience and reputation and bails before leaving some limp, loving voicemails for his wife played by Rachel Weisz.
If you've read any listings for the film, Weisz and Law are the “married couple who come to see each other with fresh eyes” and get all of about fifteen minutes of screen time to depict this transformation. Their issues, like everyone else's are presented fleetingly, designed to create intrigue, perhaps to give the audience a chance to insert their own back story. But their scenes are shoe-horned between those of other interconnected characters reaching their own forks in the road, so the elements that make up their predicament come across as flimsy and unimportant. Like all the characters in 360, their scenes don't have the heightened emotion or painful lack thereof to make their point.
Worse, the connections between the characters serve absolutely no purpose except to make the highly original point that we're all in the same boat. We meet the photographer Weisz is having an affair with, his ex-girlfriend and the sex offender she tries to bed while writer Peter Morgan thumps us around the head yelling 'you only live once'.
You'd think once would be enough but director Fernando Meirelle insists on sending his mind-numbingly stupid characters into blatantly unwise situations repeatedly. Like when the sister of the Slovakian prostitute sees fit to jump in the car of a Russian mobster, apparently seizing the day or taking a fork or something. Oh and in case you haven't got simultaneous spontaneity of it all, don't worry, he spells it out in split-screen for you.
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