The premise to 15 Minutes is fairly simple. Two friends, one from Russia and the other from Czechoslovakia, come to visit the United States. We’re never quite sure why one of them wants to visit, but we do find out that the other has a dream of being a Hollywood director. One thing leads to another and the two end up in a murder spree in Manhattan, videotaping it all along the way. After being bombarded with exploitative news programming, and all the other absurdities that plague American TV, the two concoct a scheme to get rich by videotaping their murder of a prominent figure and selling it to a news program. On the trail to try and catch these two is Hollywood heavyweight Robert De Niro and up-and-coming actor/director Edward Burns. De Niro is a decorated cop who loves media attention. Burns plays a fire investigator who’d rather keep his head down and solve a crime quietly.

15 Minutes is a movie with something to say, but it goes about it in the wrong way. It argues that the media’s and the public’s seemingly insatiable desire for more extreme and graphic stimulation is going way too far. That’s fine, but it’s how it gets there that is so wrong-headed. I’m not really giving away anything in the movie by telling you that their murder video does get aired. However, what’s seen in this TV airing is nothing that the audience doesn’t actually see in the movie -- the blood, guts, struggle, and then slow and lingering death. And that’s supposed to be shocking? How can it be when the filmmakers showed their audience all that and more? What were they thinking? That it’s all right to show the same type of gratuitous violence in a movie? Not to mention the almost voyeuristic murder of a prostitute that takes place earlier. If the filmmakers were aware of this double standard they set, perhaps they could have found a more intelligent and less gratuitous way of trying to make their point.

I’m sure people will come out of the theater and ask themselves if this sort of thing could really happen. Although it’s quite unlikely that most people would be stupid enough to think they could get away with it, like the two criminals in the movie seem to think, it’s definitely possible that some lunatic could try it. Would the news media buy a copy of the tape and air it on prime time TV? Perhaps, but unlikely, because it would certainly seem to me that they could be considered accomplices to the crime if they did, and didn’t report it to the police. Regardless, I don’t think those questions are as important as asking if we really need to have a movie like this. My answer is no, and because of that 15 Minutes gets only a **1/2 rating.

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