Minor mishap from the maker of Swingers. Doug Liman's underfunded and overrated first film at least had a pretense of social observation within a restricted radius of reality, though even there he showed signs of excessive awareness of the audience and his effect on it. Observation tended to be outbalanced by exhibitionism. In his higher-bracket second film he appears to be looking over his shoulder every step of the way. Looking over his shoulder, eagerly raising his eyebrows, pleadingly dipping his chin. The narrative structure of three overlapping storylines, stretched across a twenty-four-hour time period, separated by printed chapter headings, and unspooled not with cross-cutting but with backing up and going over the same ground all over again, seems to remind people of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. That, for sure, would be a reasonable object of comparison if you wanted to stress the copy-cat trendiness. Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train might be the better object of comparison if you wanted to spotlight a sensitivity to structure. An appreciation of structure. A feeling for it. Liman, by contrast, has his hands too full with the immediate sensation -- thudding background music, unmoored camera, double-exposure drug hallucination, Vegas Strip montage, top-heavy topless dancers, car chase, etc. -- to have any grasp of the bigger picture. And the storylines themselves -- drug deal gone bad, Vegas spree gone bad, community service gone bad -- are not as clever as they want or need to be. The third one, about two soap-opera actors who hope to erase their rap sheets with a bit of undercover police work, and about the secret agenda of the enigmatic cop, is cleverer than the others, but not so clever as to free itself from the premise that an actor would forget all about the pacemaker-sized microphone taped to his groin and would never have had a reason to visit the men's room from afternoon to midnight. Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, Taye Diggs, Timothy Olyphant, William Fichtner. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd