360

I had high hopes for this. The director of City Of God and The Constant Gardener? The writer of The Queen and Last King Of Scotland? Hopkins and Foster are always worth a watch, right? And those multi-plotted dramas like Babel and Magnolia et al are intriguing in their message. 360, however, just stumbles about the place being only intermittingly engaging. Based on Reigen, Arthur Schnitzler's play seems to have been just a jump off point as 360 gets lost on the way back around.

Slovenian prostitute Lucia Siposova arranges to meet Jude Law's businessman in a bar in Vienna but when he's interrupted by his would-be partners, Law rethinks the meet and, feeling guilty, goes back to his hotel room to call his wife, Rachel Weisz. Weisz is having an affair, however, with a Brazilian photographer whose girlfriend, Maria Flor, is fed up with his cheating and boards a plane to Brazil. It's here she sits the kindly Hopkins, searching for his missing-feared-dead daughter. Stuck at a snowbound airport, she takes recently-released sex offender Ben Foster to her hotel room to kill the boredom

360 continues in that fashion, with one story sliding into the next and then back again. It's a relay, with the baton handing going smoother in some cases than others. Morgan and Meirelles keep the snippets short - each last about seven minutes at a time - just enough to get into the stories and to know the characters. It's also a tease - just as one story is beginning to cook, Meirelles cuts to the next story.

After a while, however, that tactic forces interest to wane. Whereas Magnolia managed to keep the kettle boiling throughout its three hours, with each snippet feeling like it was the last ten minutes of a movie, 360 on the other hand feels like we're constantly in the first third of a movie: nothing has really kicked off yet. Noticing the passing of time becomes unavoidable and you begin to think that the reason why it's longer than it should be is that there were fears in the editing room of the movie's message being lost. Best throw in everything then.

The fine performances are distracting - distracting in that they divert attention from the lack of momentum - with Hopkins, Weisz, Foster and Law the shiny packaging surrounding a present that is ultimately disappointing.