Fletch's Mini Film Review: What Just Happened?

Robert DeNiro heads a game cast including Sean Penn and Bruce Willis playing alternate versions of themselves in Barry Levinson's latest satire. DeNiro plays Ben, a producer constantly battling to climb the literally slippery Hollywood power slope. He's juggling his priorities between a drugged out British director (Michael Wincott) that's made either the best or most offensive film of the year, a studio head (Catherine Keener) more than willing to toss him aside if he can't make her happy, an ex-wife he hopes to reconcile with (or at least sleep with), a daughter he barely knows, Willis, and half the rest of the greater Los Angeles area.

Unlike his gratingly self-referential turn in Ocean's Twelve, Willis is having a ball here playing an asshole, and it shows, from his wardrobe room temper tantrum to his Grant-like beard. DeNiro, meanwhile, has one of his best roles of the last decade - see what just happens when you don't always play a cop or a mobster? Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, and Robin Wright Penn co-star.

This is the type of film that has really no social significance outside of perhaps informing the general public as to what a producer really does, but is a ball nonetheless, especially for movie geeks and other folks that think they want to work in the business. It's a self-serving, lie-a-minute, snail-paced-while-seeming-fast affair, but those that live it wouldn't have it any other way.

Fletch's Film Rating:

"Darn tootin!"