Review of Cube

Introduction

Pants.
Pants pants and more pants.

This movie is, I believe, based on a short story I read about 10 years ago called "The Box". The plot is potentially interesting and I hadn`t seen any of the cast before, which pleased me as I always like a bit of fresh blood..

Did I mention it was pants?

Video

The story is that 6 people have been deposited somehow (they have no memories of the detail) in a metallic box roughly 14 feet square. We have a cop, a student, a doctor and an office worker, quickly joined by an ex-con and a mental deficient. They discover very quickly that each cube is connected by each of it`s six doors to six other cubes, but only one door is safe to pass, the others all being booby-trapped in very imaginative ways. The tension of being in such a small, bizarre place, coupled with the seemingly endless maze of traps should make for a very good pyschological thriller.
But it doesn`t.
Sadly the most interesting character (Wren the ex-con escape artist) has his face burned off with acid in the first 5 minutes (looked sore). We`re left with a conspiracy theorist middle aged doctor (It` a Pentagon experiment), the office guy who actually helped design part of the cube, unknowingly (no-one knows who`s in charge of this - there IS no-one in charge),The Maths student (dah, for some reason she says "dah" a lot, honest..), the headcase who is soooo obviously going to be an idiot sauvant from his constant and very poor Dustin Hoffman impersonations and last but not least the bigoted, sexist, pyscho loony cop.
They all over-act, but my God, I have NEVER seen over-acting like the guy who plays the cop, he could over-act as an olympic discipline.
Plot is weak as it is, but the attempts to gloss big holes over or explain things like how something that big managed to get built in total secrecy in the first place, let alone how "they" have managed to keep sending teams of people into it without anyone noticing are laughable - which is good because I needed some light relief by this stage. The Math`s student turns out to be Carol Vorderman on performance-enhancing drugs, only to be outdone by the sauvant, who can factor enormous prime numbers in his head in seconds, despite the student`s earlier careful explanations that it could only possibly be done with a large computer. The point about sauvants is that they do things which are humanly possible extremely well, better than anyone else. They don`t do the humanly impossible..oh never mind.
I think some of them die and some don`t, really can`t remember which ones, although I spent much of the film praying for another interesting booby-trap to shred someone. There`s one good bit early on when a guy walks into a giant mesh of cheese-wires which neatly dices him - very impressive, although the special effects budget obviously didn`t run to blood, or he healed quickly.

Audio

DD 5.1
Turned my amp off because the mad cop shouting rubbish at everything that moved and most things which didn`t was REALLY p***ing me off.

Features

Production photos (ooh...interesting)
Trailer
Director explaining what went wrong, hopefully.

Conclusion

No No No.

Excellent in theory, could have been great with the right cast and someone writing the screenplay who didn`t get bored half way through. I mean, having spent the entire movie emphasising that alone they were all dead, only using the unique skills of the others (maths, moaning, maths and shouting) did they stand a chance, the bloody loony copy turns up having found his way on his own through 17,000 booby trapped cubes, presumabley by shouting, with just a smear of blood on his shirt to indicate he`s had a bad time.. It`s just lazy.
It`s only saving grace was some of the effects and the thought that it MAY have been a fly-on-the-wall thing about the torture and murder of some rubbish actors.