Sometime in the future, after the last electronic signals from our dying civilization have skittered into space, a more advanced life form will intercept them and have a good long extraterrestrial laugh. Most of it will be at the absurdity of the products of our mass media. But an ironic after chuckle will be reserved for all the time we spent lamenting that same media’s undue influence, as though we ever intended to do anything about it.
A case in point is 15 Minutes, a semi-satirical crime thriller about two Eastern-European sociopaths planning to use electronic media both to get famous for their crimes and afterward to get exonerated and rich. Calculating Emil (Karel Roden) manipulates bearish, childlike Oleg (Oleg Taktarov), who meanwhile satisfies his filmmaking ambition by recording their murderous exploits on a hand held video camera. So even as they’re pursued by a media hungry homicide cop named Flemming (Robert DeNiro) and a young arson investigator (Edward Burns), they’re in pursuit of access to a Hard Copy-style tabloid TV program and its ambitious anchor (Kelsey Grammer).
Add the fact that Flemming is literally in bed with the media-via his TV-reporter girlfriend (Melina Kanakaredes)-and everything falls into place. Which is exactly the problem: Who in the audience doesn’t already pledge allegiance to the platitude that image counts more than reality? Who doesn’t know that the media fabricates celebrities indiscriminately, and turns perpetrators into victims? That habitual voyeurism strips our moral sense?
With its amoral villain’s camera-eye, 15 Minutes recalls Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990). The best known send-up of TV perfidy, Network, is also relevant, if somewhat dated, but 15 Minutes writer-director John Herzfeld barely touches on the corporate forces that spawn and perpetuate on-air dreck.
The film is partly redeemed by its satirical streak: The argument that causes the split between Emil and Oleg, for instance, is over who’ll get on screen credit for their movie. And a sleazy high-priced lawyer tells his insanity-plea client, ’’You have to concentrate on three things: paranoia, fear and delusions.’’
But to peddle another cliche, most of this stuff is virtually beyond satire, and the film’s ironies are ham-fisted. What’s more, 15 Minutes doesn’t hesitate to traffic in its own stereotyping, especially in casting Eastern Europeans as its villains in terms familiar to anyone who’s seen a Hollywood thriller in the past decade: amoral, greedy, sadistic, wily and childlike. ’’I love America. No one is responsible for what they do, ’’ observes Emil. ’’I’m smarter than Americans, ’’ he also says, and later, under duress adds, ’’Americans are ###, ’’ just in case we’d gotten the mistaken impression he thinks highly of Americans.
The biggest problem with the film, though, might be that Herzfeld seems more upset that his villains want to be famous than with any of the horrific crimes they commit. Its smugness suggests 15 Minutes considers itself part of the solution, not more of the same problem.