Film: Cocaine can't stop this film from being kicked

When I saw the trailer for Kicked in the Head, I couldn't wait to see it. Who wouldn't be intrigued by the grassroots glamour of a low-budget, fast-paced, ultra-hip Lower East Side epic starring Linda Fiorentino, James Woods, Michael Rapaport, and Lili Taylor? Add to this recipe Executive Producer Martin Scorsese and up-and-coming young director Matthew Harri-son, who has two feature-length pictures, several short films, and a Jury Prize from Cannes under his belt, and it's hard not to get excited. Yet, despite its pedigree, Kicked in the Head is a movie with an identity crisis.

I couldn't decide if Matthew Harrison wanted to make a romance, a crime movie, a personal epic, or just another meandering Gen-X flick when he wrote and directed Kicked in the Head, and I don't think he could either. I guess he just figured he'd do it all, and wound up not doing anything convincingly. The movie lacks an anchor, and as a result, Harrison's style seems schizophrenic rather than idiosyncratic.

Redmond (Kevin Corrigan, who also collaborated on the script) is the film's ostensible focus. An introspective twenty-something haunted by recurring dreams of the exploding Hindenberg dirigible, Redmond wanders in a perpetual haze of quasi-inspiration, struggling to get his life together in a world that offers up little more than confusion. Redmond is crafted in the tradition of laconic protagonists such as Sal Paradise, Nick Carraway, Holden Caulfield, and Ponyboy, but his voice lacks their clarity and originality. Harrison never develops his character enough for us to care what happens to him.

Kicked in the Head starts out promisingly--there is a kinetic energy to the (often hand-held) camera-work and a kamikaze elegance to the dialogue. I couldn't help but revel in the familiarity of certain moments: when Redmond takes a sip of beer, he shakes his head despondently and sighs, "That apartment ate my life." However, the angsty dialogue and the claustrophobic filming become tiring as we gradually realize there's little substance behind the style.

Michael Rapaport, a major player in the first half of the film, delivers an energetic and entertaining performance as Redmond's buddy, Stretch, yet drifts inexplicably from the action later on. Although Rapaport performs well, it is the performance he always gives. The same can be said for Linda Fiorentino as Megan, the hardened stewardess who is the object of Redmond's obsession. James Woods, who plays Redmond's crooked but harmless Uncle Sam (I desperately hope that Harrison was not also trying to film an allegory), inspires a laugh now and again, but doesn't seem to be taking his role very seriously.

As the movie accelerates toward nowhere, the inconsistencies that you might excuse in a better film begin to eat away at your soul. Characters come and go as they please, or disappear entirely, or have no discernible purpose. After several point-blank shoot-outs, each leaving no one either wounded or dead, you wonder if it is possible for so many people to be such bad shots. And I'm sorry, but there is no way in heaven or hell that a brick of cocaine would still be lying untouched on the floor the morning after a crowded party. The movie just loses all of its energy--the scenes get longer and slower and the dialogue gets more trite and melodramatic as Harrison begins to focus on the relationship between Red-mond and Megan. When the credits roll, Harrison has either tied up his numerous loose ends in a careless, improbable manner or left them dangling.

Autobiography often lends itself to sloppiness, which seems to be the biggest problem with Kicked in the Head. As the production notes reveal, Harrison sees his films as a way to discover who he is and what his life is all about. In fact, he and Corrigan wrote most of the script for the moviein the apartment where a good deal of the film is actually shot.

I can see them cracking up around the table at 3 a.m. with an ashtray full of butts and a couple of empty beers, saying, "We have to fit that Planet of the Apes thing into the script somehow, dude--that is so fucking funny." There are too many moments when you sense that a whole scene is constructed around Harrison's desire to incorporate into the film just a funny, but not necessarily relevant, line or conversation he had late one night. Unfortunately, all this tinkering results in a piecemeal film that wants to be too much and ends up being nothing.

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