PLOT:
It’s 1880 in Cuba, and a rich guy marries a beautiful young woman who is so crazy and violent she makes Snoop Doggy Dog look like a cheerful widow in a quilting bee.

THE REVIEW:
I think this movie is about Angelina Jolie’s lips – because every five minutes, no matter what’s going on, the director feels compelled to show us a massive close-up of those huge smackers. I mean, they should make a film with Angelina titled ‘Kiss of Death’, and it’d be about a woman who avenges her botched collagen operation by using her enormous flappers to drive men crazy with lust. Bruce Willis could be the wisecracking cop who finally has to shoot her in order to save Chicago’s single bars. That’d be a damn good movie, unlike this piece of pseudo-artistic junk.

The story takes place about 100 years ago in Cuba. Antonio Banderas is Louis Durand, a guy who has got it made: he’s rich, handsome, has a nice pad, and the chicks dig him. But he wants to get married and have children. Big, big mistake, because that’s an unnatural feeling for a man, and Antonio is made to pay for such a stupid decision.

He marries Angelina, probably because of her huge lips, they have a lot of sex, and then she gives him so much grief he starts to feel like Robert Downey Jr’s parole officer. Again, a normal man would split the scene when he realizes he’s married a psycho dame. But Antonio just gets more involved. Why? Because he feels sorry for her. O please! How about an IV-drip of reality. That’d be like Hugh Hefner feeling bad about a Bunny who is deliberating over breast implants. It just wouldn’t happen because she could be replaced with a phone call.

Anyway, Angelina keeps getting crazier and Antonio just loves her more and more, until… well, I shouldn’t reveal anymore of the plot, but be warned that it twists more than Chubby Checker sitting on a 5,000-volt cattle prod.

This movie started me thinking about Cuba, about how much I love that island. I used to play a club there, the Hotel Nacional. In fact, I was there in January 1959, when Fidel Castro went ape and kicked out the gangsters. Too bad, because nobody can party like gangsters. Communists are serious and sour and hairy.

But I stuck around and got to know Che Guevara, Fidel’s right-hand man. He wasn’t like the others. I remember that he had a stack of Sinatra albums. He asked me a lot of questions about the entertainment business, like, did I know Ed Sullivan or Elvis Presley. He said that he wanted to get out of the revolutionary gig, and just race stock cars. But instead Che stuck around too long and got wasted in Bolivia. There’s a moral in that story.

Maybe ‘Original Sin’ wants to be a Cuban version of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ or even ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. It’s hard to say because every time this movie starts to go somewhere, we get a close-up of ‘The Lips’ (which are actually kind of terrifying on a wide screen) and it all shudders to a stop.

THE BOTTOMLINE:
If there is such a thing as an ‘original sin’, it must be asking people for ten dollars to sit through 2 hours of watching some simpletons whisper to each other, trying to seem profound and dangerous. Take your coins, buy a CD of Buena Vista Social Club, mix a margarita, kick back and enjoy.

© 2001 IMC Communications Be sure to visit Dusty at FilmCan at www.filmcan.ca