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Pendulum

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Christopher Null
Christopher Null founded Filmcritic.com in 1995.
Pendulum got me thinking: Has there ever been a worse-cast choice to play a cop than former supermodel Rachel Hunter? I thought and I thought -- Pamela Anderson on V.I.P. came to mind, but she's a bodyguard, not a cop.

In the end, I had to admit it: Rachel Hunter is the worst movie cop of all time. And what's the point of hiring a supermodel if you're going to give her an enormous facial abrasion to wear through the entire film? It's distracting, it's ugly... and oddly, it's the most interesting thing to consider in this film.

Pendulum is a film of such uncommon badness that it nearly defies description. It looks promising: Investigation into the murder of a professor who turns out to be defiling his students in return for grades... but that investigation is bungled so badly that it comes off as nothing more than utterly stupid. So many subplots, blind alleys, and false leads are followed that the film loses what little cohesion it had to begin with.

And Hunter's cop is so incompetent there's virtually nothing about her investigation that is buyable. Does the Dallas, Texas police force hire New Zealanders as homicide detectives? If it had made Pendulum the least bit palatable, I was ready to bite.

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