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RIDICULOUS DIALOGUE PART OF THE FUN OF `ALONE'
By Chris Hewitt
Knight Ridder
The year is still young, but 2005's foremost so-bad-it's-fun movie might turn out to be ``Alone in the Dark.''
The unintentional hilarity begins with chest-flashing party girl Tara Reid cast as a brilliant archaeologist.
Reid, whose name should not be found in the same sentence as the words ``brilliant'' or ``archaeologist'' -- or, for that matter, ``actress'' -- plays the sort of brilliant archaeologist who wears midriff-baring baby tees to her museum job and doesn't know how to pronounce ``Newfoundland.'' The producers could spin off her character into an adventure-archaeology series: ``Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dumb.''
The rest of this ``28 Days Later'' and ``Alien'' hybrid also worships at the temple of dumb. Christian Slater deserves props for not embarrassing himself as a ``paranormal investigator'' who announces, ``I hunt and track down the strange and the unusual.'' Not just the strange but also the unusual? I'll bet he hunts and tracks down the odd and the weird and the unconventional, too. Slater also finds the hidden nuances in these three lines of dialogue: ``Go, go!'' ``Go, go, go!'' and, my favorite, ``Go, go, go, go!''
Reid is awful. Slater isn't awful. But none of the actors, including Stephen Dorff as a brilliant something-or-other, is remotely believable as a person in any position of power.
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