Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Bug

Don't believe the horror hype

By PETER KEOUGH | May 23, 2007

2.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Bug.

“From the director of The Exorcist!” goes this film’s marketing campaign. Those expecting Bug to be some kind of horror movie will be disappointed, however. So will those expecting something more subtle or artful. William Friedkin opens up Tracy Letts’s play with one soaring, mysterious aerial shot into the motel of the setting, and from there it’s relentlessly inward we go. Saloon girl Agnes (Ashley Judd) shrinks from the ringing telephone because she knows it’s her abusive ex (Harry Connick Jr.), newly sprung from the joint and back to get her. Soft-spoken oddball stranger Peter (Michael Shannon) seems kindly and protective, but he confirms Agnes’s bad judgment in men — he says he’s a veteran and the victim of scientific experiments, and after their first roll in the hay, he introduces her to his obsession: bugs. He’s kind of like the guy in A Scanner Darkly but not as amusing, and despite all the energy, the final götterdämmerung merely bugged me.

Related: Perversion, introversion, The Hills Have Eyes II, An American Haunting, More

Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Business, Movies, More

| More

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: FOLLOW ME: THE YONI NETANYAHU STORY | May 29, 2012
Whatever your opinion of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, you can't deny that his brother Yoni was a hero, a courageous man whose conflicts and triumphs mirror those of his homeland.

REVIEW: MOONRISE KINGDOM | May 31, 2012
Wes Anderson should always make movies featuring characters who are pubescent or younger — like Rushmore , which until this film was his best.

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.