360

With 360 director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Peter Morgan offer an ensemble piece featuring several tangentially related stories about love, sex, and money. The idea to weave separate elements such as these together is hardly a new one, but (as is often the case with this type of film) not all the stories measure up, and despite the film's insistence that it has some great wisdom to impart by throwing all these characters together, in the end 360 is still something of a mess.

The stories involve a man (Anthony Hopkins) searching for his lost daughter who meets a young woman (Maria Flor) who has recently broken up with her boyfriend (Juliano Cazarré) on a flight to the United States, an aspiring prostitute (Lucia Siposová) and her sister (Gabriela Marcinkova), a recently released sex offender (Ben Foster) stuck in a Colorado airport, a couple (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz) each having secret affairs, and a dentist (Jamel Debbouze) struggling with his feelings for his assistant (Dinara Drukarova) who is married to the driver (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) of a Russian gangster (Johannes Krisch).

Despite the script's attempt to cleverly unite all the stories together in various ways, the film could use quite a bit of editing as many of the smaller stories aren't worth the trouble. Hopkins and Flor's story works well (as one of the few tales with a definite beginning and conclusion), and I would have enjoyed seeing far more of Vdovichenkov and Marcinkova's short time together when their separate stories merge near the end of the movie. However, Law, Weisz, and Foster are all wasted here in screen time that could have gone to fleshing out the other stories, many of which are left unfinished by the time the credits roll.

A mixed success, 360 is worth seeing for the performances and the parts of the movie that do work well, but given its flaws the movie is not worth spending much effort to seek out. Both the single-disc DVD and Blu-ray include a pair of short behind-the-scenes featurettes on the making of the movie as well the film's trailer.

[Magnolia Home Entertainment, DVD $26.98 / Blu-ray $29.98]