SKIP CARTER
by Ed Owens

It's pretty easy to assign blame for Get Carter's problems. It's certainly not the performances, which range from merely adequate to surprisingly good (at the very least, far better than the material deserves). Sylvester Stallone does some good work here, though even a master thespian would have a hard time rising above David McKenna's miserable screenplay (problem number one). It's also not the cinematography, which is frequently very rich and perfectly composed, slave as it is to the odd whims of director Stephen Kay (problem number two).

No, the blame lies squarely on the two people already mentioned - McKenna and Kay. While McKenna's pointlessly meandering script is certainly vapid enough on its own, Kay's lethargic direction results in a movie that is largely coma-inducing. To make it worse, Kay has wrapped the inert narrative around key bursts of hyper-kinetic action and style, none of which are actually decipherable amidst the flurry of motion and technique. Particularly jarring is the realization that, once such outbursts have passed, the narrative has either not advanced at all or moved in such random fashion as to leave the viewer dazed and confused.

In the end, Get Carter has moved from a to b, but one would be hard pressed to determine exactly how...or, more importantly, why. Languishing as it does for most of its seemingly interminable 103 minutes, the film leaves one wondering if the tortured expressions on some of the characters are really the result of acting at all.

CineScene, 2000