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100When you watch Wonderland, going back twenty years plus, you think you're in for some paleontological expedition. Yet, thanks to James Cox's considered and adept direction, a cast and script that never cheats the experience or realism of Hollywood's enigmatic underbelly -- the drama of the 1981 Wonderland murders is de-petrified.
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80Another of the film's positive aspects is its narrative style, reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.
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80A film whose effects are as hard to wash away as blood.
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75Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.
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75Once you leave Wonderland, you may feel like you need a shower, but, while you're in the moment, it's a compelling journey into the depths of hell on earth.
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60F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong: there are second acts in American lives. But all too many of them are sad, sordid or both, as this fact-based story of sex, drugs and murder featuring adult-movie superstar John Holmes aptly demonstrates.
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The film is so truncated, so obsessed with style and composed of so many self-contained episodes that it fails to say anything new.
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50Character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.
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50True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.
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50The murder-mystery plot is told in rough-and-tumble style, full of sound and fury but signifying almost nothing in the end.
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50Never gives us a single reason to care about any of these people. It's a druggy, sordid spectacle.
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50Becomes a little more compelling as it progresses because Lisa Kudrow (as the straight-arrow first Mrs. Holmes, who halfway stood with him despite her disgust) ends up being surprisingly well cast. She engages in some very un-Friends-like fiery exchanges that also give Kilmer his best scenes.
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50Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.
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50The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.
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50When we finally do see what happened, it's a genuine shock, a nightmare vision of a hedonist who forged his own hell.
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50This film disappointingly feels like a sometimes brilliantly acted, often gorgeously filmed re-enactment of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries."
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50The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.
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50As good as all the actors are, the scuzzy characters are so one-dimensional that the film falls flat.
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50Has absolutely nothing to say about its characters and their lamentable actions.
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50Cox and three others have produced a swift and economical script, but it's just porn with a different money shot--not graphic violence per se but the sort of blood-soaked crime scene that sells true-crime paperbacks.
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40There seem to be some impressive performances here, though it's not always easy to tell because director James Cox is always feverishly cutting away to something or other.
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40Wonderland is to "Boogie Nights" what "Blow" was to "Goodfellas": an accomplished knockoff with all the tricks and none of the soul.
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40Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good -- the simple story of a doomed hop-hog over his head in bad shit could've hit the nerve if left to tell itself.
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40This is the latest addition to a new type of drug movie -- one that exploits addiction for a lot of self-adoring showboating.
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40With its flashbacks, split-screen montages, decade-jumping soundtrack, sped-up action and frequent shifts of light and color, Wonderland feels like "Law & Order" on crack.
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40We are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. [6 October 2003, p. 138]
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38It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.
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38The problem is that there's not a sympathetic character among the nasty, brutish males. And the women, except for a flashy cameo by a swimsuit-clad Paris Hilton, are given short shrift.
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38The filmmakers may have wanted to deconstruct any sense of a formal, cohesive narrative; instead, they have merely demolished it.
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38Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.
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38It's theoretically possible to make a fascinating film about a thieving, self-indulgent, freebasing, treacherous scumbag who pimps his girlfriend to a gangster and contributes nothing to society. Wonderland isn't that film.
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30Possibly one of the dullest takes on a real-life murder mystery, this gutter’s-eye-view of the waning days of Los Angeles porn king John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes is barely as interesting as one of the big man’s films, and a lot less revelatory.
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30It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.
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25While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.
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Sordid, brutal and depressing.
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20Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 8
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Mixed: 1 out of 8
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Negative: 0 out of 8
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Andy7
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Sarah9This movie was awsome i love the drugs and the stealing but it need more drugs sex n rock n roll!