I might be tempted to give up on Eddie Murphy, especially after watching Holy Man. Again, a funny idea does not an entire movie make. A few more funny ideas mixed in would have helped the whole thing move. This film wasted a $60 million budget by trying to cover too many bases, the exact opposite problem of Blue Streak. Eddie makes this movie worth watching, but it should have been hilarious from start to finish. Fortunately, Eddie went on to make the very good movie Life, so I forgive him.

Plenty of people that are smarter than I am have tried to figure out what was wrong with Wild Wild West. I don't know either. For an action movie, there wasn't a lot of action. For a comedy, it wasn't extremely funny. For a, well, you get the idea. It might have been a jack of all trades, master of none. Kevin Kline can be funny (as in Dave or In & Out) and so can Will Smith (as in Men In Black or his long-running TV show). Kenneth Branagh can certainly be a nasty bad guy. Selma Hayek is all that and a bag of chips. Add the four together and what do you get? Not what you'd expect.

Call it fate, call it a quirk of scheduling, or simply face up to the fact that the movie was a pretty good movie pitched to an audience that tends to demand excellence. eXistenz premiered barely two weeks after The Matrix, which might have hurt it a little though the similarities are mostly cosmetic. Then again, The Thirteenth Floor premiered roughly six weeks later, and I liked it much better. eXistenz probably looked great on a punch-list for studio execs. Virtual reality? Check. Cute male and female leads? Check. Can we hire someone to help us pretend we know anything about technology? Check. How about a major plot twist to make people want to see it again? Check. The problem is, I bought both The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor on DVD, but I didn't even watch eXistenz twice. I was tempted a little, but I resisted. It just wasn't that complex. It tried to be, but it wasn't. Instead, it was too clever by half.