Possibly determined to unwind and stay in touch with his inner girlie man as Agent 007 is poised to take screens by storm everywhere once again, Daniel Craig confounds with the simultaneous small screen release of Flashbacks of A Fool and his Casino Royale brawny Bond sequel, Quantum Of Solace.
Playing a kind of hopelessly dissipated futuristic Bond has-been celeb undone by an overload of hard drugs and sex orgies, Craig clearly wants it both ways in creative identity crisis mode, as both a star and serious artist.
Written and directed by British filmmaker Baillie Walsh, Flashbacks Of A Fool follows Craig’s once fabulously famous and ridiculously wealthy Hollywood superstar and party animal Joe Scott on a journey back in time to his humble UK roots. There’s an intimation that it isn’t the decadent LA lifestyle or obsessive worries about male breast cancer that have driven Scott nearly over the edge with concurrent addiction issues, but rather a possible dark secret buried in his adolescent past, and connected to a local horny housewife.
Flashbacks Of A Fool loses its way somewhere in the midst of fleshing out a clash of multicultural dynamics, between Hollywood excess and a supposed more wholesome UK family values melodramatic way of life that never quite proves its point. Which leaves the ungrounded personality of Scott as just that, an expatriate Brit immersed in an American lifestyle that as a portrait remains barely fleshed out. Ditto for rapper Eve in the all too typical Mammy role as Scott’s disapproving adult nanny, a character whose own extended screen time would have gone far towards grounding both the main character and this earnest but unbalanced production.
Anchor Bay Entertainment
Rated R
2 stars
