The big splash of writer-director Joel Hopkins is actually more of a small plop: a would-be sprightly road movie cum buddy movie about a reluctant Nigerian fiancé and a rejected French suitor who travel together to the former's appointed wedding in Niagara Falls, the Capital of Love as well as the Suicide Capital (something for both of them). Travelling roughly the same route, and eventually in the same automobile, is a Spanish señorita who, at first sight, has turned the bridegroom's head. A further complication: she is travelling with her smugly possessive British boyfriend. What partially deflates the sought-after sprightliness is the almost eerie barrenness of the shoestring production -- the emptiness, the stillness, the quietness. What partway pumps it up again is Natalia Verbeke, a minor-league Penelope Cruz who looks ready to step up to the majors: ready, at any rate, to be pencilled in under Cruz on the screenplay routing slip. What again pokes a pin in it, though, is the underwritten role of the Nigerian, whose chief assets, after his nice manners, are his crippling introversion, his air of gloom, and his -- or rather Tunde Adebimpe's -- mechanical acting style. With Hippolyte Girardot, James Wilby. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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