Bovie Movie

This film is based on an innovative short film made for MTV about a guy living in a horrible downtown apartment filled with scores of mischievous, smart-alecky roaches. The story chronicles the adventures of Joe (Jerry O’Connell), a hapless rube from the rural Midwest who journeys to the wilds of New York City. Mugged repeatedly on his arrival, his luck seems to turn when he finds an affordable apartment in a very dubious neighborhood. Unfortunately, his landlord (Don Ho) is more interested in evicting or, if need be, murdering his tenants, so that the building can be turned into a (highly profitable) penitentiary. Joe finds the allies he needs in his apartment’s cockroaches, who sing and dance their way into his heart. This film should be of interest for fans of 1930s musicals; it makes reference to Busby Berkeley’s elaborate dance phantasmagorias and the odd water ballets of Esther Williams. Many of the scenes utilized real roaches who were “choreographed” via tiny filament harnesses and other devices. Animal rights activists will be pleased to note that no roaches were intentionally harmed during filming.

Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is a New York City cab driver who seems to have absorbed every bit of crackpot information passed along as “suppressed news” that’s surfaced on talk radio or the Internet in the past 20 years. Anti-United Nations militia men who are actually U.N. operatives? NASA scientists engineering earthquakes? Oliver Stone’s secret life as a government agent discrediting conspiracy theorists? Jerry’s heard ‘em all and believes most of them, and even publishes his own journal of forbidden information, with a subscription list that now totals five people. In short, Jerry seems like just another New York City lunatic, and while he spends a fair amount of his spare time following Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), a government attorney, Alice regards him as harmless; he once intervened while she was being mugged, and he’s been acting like her benign if whacked-out protector ever since. However, one day Jerry is kidnapped and worked over by CIA operatives; he is convinced that one of the theories he uncovered must be for real — but he has no idea which one. He tries to get Alice to help him, and before long both are drawn into a dangerous web that leads to a startling revelation of just how Jerry got this way. Mel Gibson gives a fine comic performance, and those with a taste for alternative media will have fun dissecting which of the theories Jerry spouts are “real” (or at least appeared before this film was made) and which were the invention of the screenwriters.