Times Online
June 20, 2002
By James Christopher

Among the 20 films opening in the next two weeks, only a handful will make it to mid-July. That’s a pretty shocking statistic. Traditionally this time of year is the dead zone. The summer blockbuster makes the big splash and everyone else hides. But there is a plague of potential flops upon us.

Nervously fleeing the pulling power of Spider-Man, Minority Report (July 4) and Scooby-Doo (July 12), these films are squashed like sardines into the most unglamorous fortnight between now and Christmas.

Chen Kaige’s embarrassing pot-boiler Killing me Softly is so bad it’s hysterical. The venerable director, whose films routinely grace Cannes, claims he would never have been allowed to make such an erotic film in China. I think the word he’s looking for is ridiculous. Joseph Fiennes smoulders for England as a world-famous, accident-prone mountaineer. He meets Heather Graham at a set of traffic lights in London, and five minutes later he’s kneading her naked breasts as if all the patisseries in Notting Hill depended upon it. There are no half measures where this preposterous passion is concerned. “I could break your neck I love you so much,” says Fiennes. A series of poison-pen letters telling Graham this is entirely likely does nothing to deter her, or fool us. Natascha McElhone has rarely looked so guilty as Fiennes’s demented sister. This is tripe with lashings of gratuitous nudity.