Jericho Mansions

A film review by Christopher Null - Copyright © 2004 Filmcritic.com

What the hell?

This conflagration of Barton Fink and Melrose Place makes as close to zero sense as it gets, and that's just the beginning. It gets more baffling as it moves along.

The presence of screen icon James Caan will be the only reason anyone picks this off the shelf at Blockbuster (though siren Jennifer Tilly won't hurt its chances either), but once you pop it into your DVD player you're on your own. Caan plays a building superintendent at the titular apartment building (mansions they ain't). He's agoraphobic and afraid to leave the building, but when a tenant turns up dead he's forced to deal with his issues head on: turns out he may be wholesale crazy, along with any or all of the residents of the building.

By the end you'll be crazy too, lost in a sea of dreams and fantasies as Caan tries to put it all together -- or if not all of it, at least 1 and 1.

I never made it that far, and Mansions' straight-to-DVD appearance hints that no one else could make any sense of it either. You'll come for the interesting cast (including Geneviève Bujold as a seemingly Poltergeist-inspired gray-haired loony), but I doubt you'll stay for the credits.

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Rating

1.5 out of 5 Stars

Cast and Crew

  • Director: Alberto Sciamma
  • Producer: Michael Cowan, Jean-Marc Félio, Jason Piette
  • Screenwriter: Harriet Sand, Alberto Sciamma
  • Stars: James Caan, Geneviève Bujold, Jennifer Tilly, Maribel Verdú
  • MPAA Rating: NR