The film never creates the tense, doom-laden atmosphere of William Gibson's short story about corporate espionage in a grim near-future setting, leaving the viewer to spend a numbing hour and half with unheroic and uninteresting characters doing not much of anything. The original story had little in the way of plot as well. It did, however, have a great overlying menace, set in a world where cutthroat corporate Gestapos kill to protect the technology they control. Here you only get a vague hint of that for the first ten minutes, at which point the film settles into a slice-of-lowlife study of its downbeat characters and loses all forward momentum. Watch DEMONLOVER instead for a similar story done right.
Review of New Rose Hotel
