TRAFFICKING TALE 'BLOW' GETS BOOST FROM DEPP, DESPITE ADDLED SCRIPT

A t a time when many people would rather watch than read, some films double
as textbooks. "Saving Private Ryan" prompted a resurgence of interest in
World War II. More recently, "Traffic" was rewarded with real-world respect
along with big grosses and Oscars. Ted Koppel took it as the basis of a
five-part series on "Nightline." Newspaper editorials and talk shows have
used it to call attention to our perennially ineffectual war on drugs.

A new drug film, "Blow ," won't lack for commercial rewards.

Johnny Depp is terrific as George Jung, the man credited in the real world
with bringing Colombian cocaine to the U.S., and the flamboyant production
aspires to epic scale.

But it's hard to know, through feverish highs and lumbering lows, whether
George is supposed to be smart, dumb, venal, naive, self-destructive or
unlucky.

Here's a textbook case of a film that's befuddled by its subject.

Some of the best parts come early, when the hero, an earnest kid from a
working-class Boston suburb, finds heaven on earth in Southern California.
It's the late 1960s, all the girls seem to be stewardesses and everyone is
getting stoned.

This is not the harsh, soulless landscape of "Traffic" but, as directed by
Ted Demme and shot by Ellen Kuras, a giddily enchanted strand -- actually
Manhattan Beach -- where goofballs can dream of becoming drug lords.

George Jung does more than dream.

Like some jaunty descendant of John McCabe, the cocksure entrepreneur of
"McCabe and Mrs. Miller," George sees possibilities. He finds a connection,
sells pot, turns a stewardess into a courier, falls in love. In and out of
jail, then in and out again, he's introduced by a former cellmate to Pablo
Escobar, the Colombian drug lord extraordinario , and soon finds himself
the conduit for tons of cocaine that transform American life, not to
mention his own. At one point there's too much money to count, so George
and his colleagues weigh it.

When the wild adventures lead to inevitable betrayals, Johnny Depp retains
the allure of a haunted rock star. A lesser actor might have given his
character dead eyes in the scenes where he's strung out on his own
merchandise, but Mr. Depp's intelligence and clean-burning energy keep
shining through.

He's the source of the movie's power, but also the emblem of its
fundamental problem.

With George being played by an actor of such effortless charm, no slime
ever seems to adhere to this man of little demonstrable insight or ability.

According to the erratic, episodic script, adapted by David McKenna and
Nick Cassavetes from Bruce Porter's nonfiction book, George is mainly a
good kid who simply dreamed the wrong dream. (The real George Jung is in
prison on drug charges until 2014. We see a shot of him at the end, and he
doesn't look dreamy.)

Several maudlin passages are given over to the tortured relationship
between the wayward son and his blue-collar parents.

They are played glumly, if gamely, by Ray Liotta and Rachel Griffiths. Mr.
Liotta, who is only eight years older than Mr. Depp, gets by with blue-gray
hair and a padded paunch, but costumes and makeup can't do much for the
usually scintillating Ms. Griffiths, who is five years younger than her
supposed son. That's even more bizarre than the mother-and-son casting, in
Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," of Jessie Royce Landis and Cary Grant,
who were both the same age.

Mr. Demme demonstrated a distinctive gift for directing women in his 1996
feature "Beautiful Girls," but there's no sign of it here. In fairness, the
script makes short shrift of George's first love, Barbara (Franka Potente,
the dynamic star of "Run Lola Run," making her American debut in a role
devoid of dynamism). And it's painful to see Penelope Cruz stuck with the
thankless task of playing Mirtha, a Colombian party girl who, as George's
wife, becomes an anorexic junkie and then a shrill, scolding version of his
mother. Of the other men in the large cast, I admired Jordi Molla, a
Spanish actor also making his American debut as Diego, George's cellmate,
and Paul Reubens, a k a Pee-wee Herman, in the small but crucial role of a
California drug dealer who makes exuberant and sinister seem like synonyms.
What he and George really think of one another is unclear, but no more so
than what "Blow" thinks about George.

'Along Came a Spider'

"A long Came a Spider," a sluggish thriller that's semi-redeemed by some
genuine surprises, brings Morgan Freeman back to the role of the
professorial police profiler Alex Cross. When last seen four years ago in
"Kiss the Girls," Alex was searching for a kick-boxing physician, played by
Ashley Judd, who had been abducted by a masked monster to his underground
lair. In this movie, which was directed by Lee Tamahori, he's searching for
the young daughter of a U.S. senator; she has been kidnapped from her
private school, an elite institution in Washington, D.C., whose student
body also includes the son of Russia's president.

The new search is no easier than the last one, since the new monster is
very smart (and very well played by Michael Wincott). But Alex gets some
help, plus a lot of self-pitying talk, from Jezzie Flanagan (Monica
Potter), the Secret Service agent who had been assigned to protect the
little girl. Since when do senators or their children get Secret Service
protection? Don't ask; this is a movie in which Russia's president has no
compunction about giving his kid an American education.

Suffice it to say that Mr. Freeman, a superb actor, creates the illusion of
drama even when there is none, and that Ms. Potter, an appealing actor,
gets her share of the action toward the end.

'Beautiful Creatures'

M en are brutes and women are no bargain either in the stylish black comedy
"Beautiful Creatures ," a female revenge fantasy made by men. The movie,
set in Glasgow, doesn't add up to much more than style, plus a pair of
witty performances by Rachel Weisz and Susan Lynch as Petula and Dorothy,
ill-used women who kill their vile mates.

If truth be told, "Beautiful Creatures" manages to wear out its welcome in
even less than its 92-minute running time; you can laugh at repetitively
violent absurdities for only so long.

Still, the director, Bill Eagles, working from an original script by Simon
Donald (and with a sharpshooting cinematographer, James Welland), pulls off
one clever scene after another.

In one of them, Petula, a platinum-blond ditz-with-smarts, invents a ransom
plot under the nose of a crooked but gullible detective inspector played by
Alex Norton. There's also Dorothy's faithful dog Pluto, a white-and-pink
creature -- the pink part is spray paint -- who bites off the ring finger
of Dorothy's dead boyfriend. "Very bad," Dorothy tells her pooch, then puts
the digit in the fridge.

Some of "Beautiful Creatures" is pretty bad, and pretty funny.

Video Tip: Drugs drive the plot of "Who'll Stop the Rain " (1978), Karel
Reisz's flawed but often engrossing screen version of Robert Stone's novel
"Dog Soldiers." Nick Nolte is Ray Hicks, a merchant seaman and Vietnam vet
who is conned by his former buddy, John Converse, into smuggling two kilos
of heroin into the U.S. Converse is played by Michael Moriarty, who can be
seen in a muffled performance as the senator in "Along Came a Spider."
Converse's addict wife is played, scarily well, by Tuesday Weld.