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Director John Herzfeld, who enlivened 1996 with "2 Days in the Valley" (a splendid blend of insight and action), has struggled to create a similar mix with "Fifteen Minutes" which, taking its cue from Andy Warhol's tiresome dictum, tries to splice a comment on our obsession with celebrity and the screen into a hunt-the-killer cop-thriller.
But this time all Herzfeld's aspirations come unglued at an early stage. As his film starts with a sleazy, hypocritical, foul-mouthed tabloid TV presenter (Kelsey Grammer) becoming over-reliant on a celebrity cop (Robert De Niro) for ratings, you receive the director's ideas on fame as if being bashed on the head with a mallet. Strangely, these ideas evaporate for a sizeable chunk of the film. In one unlikely interlude, two killers quite ludicrously stall a murder they are in the process of committing and filming to discuss the direction of the scene. This is, by the way, only one of a number of grim and gory moments. Whatever happened to the art of suggestion?
Like so much else in the film, there are echoes of an over-exited writer (Herzfeld again) removing the script from reality. Herzfeld, in his fever, also crams in far too much, including a spectacular fire and a shoot-out. The writer-director, who at least can sustain tension at times, also has great difficulty knitting together all his plot strands, one of which involves the growing respect between the cop and the arson investigator (Edward Burns). Inexplicably, the latter turns into a gun-toting maverick at the end.
Kelsey Grammer is just about as miscast as any actor has ever been, ever.
