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This Month's Featured Equipment Reviews |
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Past DVD Hardware / Software News |
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3 Steps to Heaven |
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DVD Mystery-Suspense
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Written by Paul Lingas
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Tuesday, 01 February 2005 |
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title:
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3 Steps to Heaven |
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studio:
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Miramax Home Entertainment |
| MPAA rating: |
R |
| starring: |
Katrin Cartlidge, Frances Barber, James Fleet, Con O’Neill, David Cardy, Paul-Mark Elliot, Stuart Laing |
| film release year: |
1995 |
| DVD release year: |
2005 |
| film rating: |
One-Half Star |
| sound/picture: |
One-and-a-Half Stars |
| reviewed by: |
Paul Lingas |
The title “3 Steps to Heaven” belies the fact that the film is such a
mess; heaven is not going to be the final end point. At once failing as
noir, psychosexual thriller and amateur detective story, the film never
gets its feet underneath it and the result is 90 minutes of viewing
frustration over a hackneyed plot that contains some of the most overly
used and unoriginal ideas in independent film. The film is fairly
devoid of anything approaching subtlety. The main actress is shown
lounging around in her underwear all the time and often the characters
do things for no apparent reason. Most of the characters inhabit a
world of cliché, made all the more obvious by the way the film was
shot, with far too many time-lapse shots of London.
“3 Steps to Heaven” was originally made through the British Film
Institute in 1995 and, apart from a few festivals, it didn’t find a
theatrical premiere until 1997 in Argentina. Now, eight years after
that, it has been snapped up in the hopes that someone can get some
money out of it. Told in a sort of poor “Rashomon” style of alternating
flashbacks, “3 Steps to Heaven” surrounds the quest of Suzanne (Katrin
Cartlidge) to find out what happened to her obscure boyfriend Sean
(Stuart Laing), who drowned under suspicious circumstances. Suzanne
decides to pursue the truth by tracking down and ineffectively
threatening the last three people to see him alive. How Suzanne knows
about these three people is never explained and just what her
relationship is to them before she confronts them is vague at best.
Each of the three people are having their own personal problems and
Suzanne seems to observe them in an odd voyeuristic way. She pulls a
gun on each one and two end up dying, though through no direct fault of
Suzanne’s. Angel (Con O’Neill), an unsavory character, is killed by a
pair of ballet-dancing gangsters (yes, ballet, in one of the most
ridiculous fight scenes ever created). Harry (James Fleet), a
politician in the midst of a gay sex scandal, accidentally kills
himself while tied up in S&M leather. Andrea (Frances Barber), an
over-the-hill, chain-smoking television personality, is frightened out
of her wits after briefly turning the tables on Suzanne and finally
explains the demise of Sean Scooby-Doo style. Suzanne is the
quintessential poorly-drawn character, in that though she tries to
instigate action, she is mostly just a foolish observer and really
doesn’t ever end up actually doing anything, apart from walking around
in her underwear and thinking about her dead lover; the performance
actually never really suggests anything bordering on love between
Suzanne and Sean, more of a frantic lust. In fact, there is so little
shown about their relationship that we have a hard time understanding
just why Sean meant so much to Suzanne.
A lot of things happen in “3 Steps to Heaven,” but they are approached
in such a lazy and disjointed way that there is little through-line to
the narrative in terms of directorial cohesion. The film as a whole
feels like a string of vignettes. Guns, drugs, knives, sex, violence
and more of the usual rigmarole fills the screen, but without any
understanding of just who these characters are, there’s no reason to
care about them and all their activities come across as an exercise in
making a low-budget thriller that feels like a long student film with
marginally better production value. There’s some terrible acting as
well. Everyone’s mobile phones keep going off, as if writer/director
Constantine Giannaris is making some sort of commentary about modern
communications without ever actually saying anything about it. The bad
guys are completely clichéd and have some of the worst movie hair I’ve
ever seen. Too many of the events and stylistic machinations are trite
and seem poorly copied from other films. In the end, all we have is a
bunch of people going through the motions with little to no emotional
or psychological impact whatsoever.
There are no bonus features on this Miramax issuing of what was
originally a made-for-TV movie. The transfer is sharp for a 10-year-old
film, but it really only serves to reveal the limitations in
cinematographic skill and overall budget that marked the production.
For example, there are several low-light scenes where the film is
disappointingly grainy. A good transfer can never replace or enhance
what was never captured by the camera in the first place and it
certainly doesn’t here. Though the aspect ratio is labeled as 1.85:1,
it seems less than that, somewhere around the HD 1.77:1. The Dolby
stereo sound mix is pedestrian and more or less gives us the simple
sound design and poor dialogue mixing of the film.
“3 Steps to Heaven” took two years to be released theatrically and 10
years to be released on video, which is enough to indicate its worth.
Final verdict: Skip it.
| more details |
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sound format:
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English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo Surround |
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aspect ratio(s):
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1.85:1
Enhanced for 16x9 televisions |
| special features: |
French and Spanish Subtitles |
| comments: |
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| reference system |
| DVD player: |
Panasonic DVD-XP50 |
| receiver: |
Denon AVR-3802 |
| main speakers: |
Polk RT 600i |
| center speaker: |
Polk CS 400i |
| rear speakers: |
Polk S4 |
| monitor: |
43” Sony KP-43HT20 |
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