The Tesseract
by Oxide Pang Chun
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alexander Rendel, Carlo Nanni, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Lena Christenchen, Saskia ReevesDirector: Oxide Pang Chun
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); Thai (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 96 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Showtime Ent.
Movie Reviews of The Tesseract
Movie Review: Garland original screenplays = good. Adapted Garland novels = ...
Summary: 2 Stars
The Tesseract (Oxide Pang, 2003)
I hereby forgive Danny Boyle for taking Alex Garland's amazing novel The Beach and turning it into the piece of celluloid excrement that it became. The problem seems to be that Alex Garland's novels have a pathological fear of being turned into movies, because unlike The Beach, The Tesseract comes with a director (The Eye's Oxide Pang) and male lead (b.Monkey's Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who are absolutely above reproach and can simply do no wrong, and the movie's still... eh.
(I hereby thank all things holy that Garland's excellent screenplay for 28 Days Later... was not, in fact, based on one of his novels.)
The Tesseract is an interesting premise; the lives of four people (a drug runner, a psychologist, a bellboy, and an injured assassin) intersect in various ways in a disreputable Bangkok hotel. You know that Pang (who also directed the above-average action flick Bangkok Dangerous) is going to be able to do wonderful things with his home turf, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers could make reading Harlot's Ghost worth watching. Add in Saskia Reeves (Dune) and you've got a recipe for a blockbuster. Problem is, it never quite gels.
Pang, as expected, does in fact do wonderful things. (His use of repeated scenes from different angels to track the deeply confusing time element in the story is wonderful.) Rhys-Meyers, though he gets surprisingly little screen time for a male lead, acts as well as he always does. Saskia Reeves, who actually gets the most screen time (along with bellboy Wit, played by newcomer Alexander Rendell), also does a good job, although her part's not as well-written as is Rhys-Meyers' or Rendell's. The action is relatively fast, the camerawork is superb. So what's wrong with it?
I can't really tell you. It's the same indefinable thing (I refuse to blame Leo DiCaprio, who does have a good actor hiding in there somewhere, viz. The Basketball Diaries and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) that made The Beach into such a crapfest. I cannot urge you strongly enough to read Alex Garland's novels; I urge you with equal fervor to avoid the movies based on them. **
Summary of The Tesseract
Four characters paths mysteriously cross at a dilapidated Bangkok hotel. A drug mule falls into an intense state of paranoia while holding a package from a local mafia boss. In the lobby, a British psychologist, suffering from the trauma of losing her son, checks in. A rising mafia boss, having plundered drugs from rival crime family, races in a car to meet the drug mule in his hotel room. Showered by a barrage of bullets, a female assassin lingers on the verge of death. Astonishingly poetic special effects rivet viewers to the screen as the characters' collective destiny unfolds.Ironies compound ironies in The Tesseract, a hyper-stylized, meta-narrative about the fateful links between four strangers staying in a Bangkok hotel called the Heaven. Sean (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a British drug runner making a local gang impatient, Rosa is a child psychologist taping interviews with local kids about their dreams, Wit (Alexander Rendel) is a little thief who lives and works there, and a female assassin (Lene Christensen) sent to deal with Sean sits bleeding from a bullet wound in one of the Heaven's drearier rooms. Wit is the link between all three adults, running errands, ingratiating himself, breaking into rooms to find items worth fencing. Based on a novel by Alex Garland (The Beach), The Tesseract is directed by Oxide Pang Chun (co-director of Infernal Affairs) and casts a feverish spell with its endless time loops, dissecting action and drama through shifting perspectives on the same scenes. --Tom Keogh
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