Disco was a high energy, drug fueled, frantic, primal experience that was beyond rationality, that defied nature, that reveled in absurdity. But this film is a bland, somber, melancholic chat fest that demands that its audience forget everything its ever heard about or seen of or actually experienced at a disco. It's beyond stupid. The whole premise is flawed, that disco died in the early eighties - it didn't, it mutated into an even more frantic, outrageous club scene. But this true fact doesn't deter the film's creators from their inaccurate pointless fantasy.
A couple of discos may have closed down or changed style in Manhattan but clubs where people danced were actually even more popular and numerous. The celebrity glitz factor may have faded, but the intense social scene was charging ahead. Cocaine was everywhere by the bucket fulls at the time, not just up Hollywood's noses, and the nightlife was running hot on its power. It was insane, deranged, unbelievable. But this dumb flick wants you to believe that a whole world was collapsing, that an entire generation of party animals quickly went extinct. Wrong.
If this movie is meant to be a comment on the virus like spread of Reagonomics into every aspect of American culture throughout the 80s, then having a grand Disco as the setting pretty much mandates that the film be a broad parody. But it isn't, it's just a self conscious exercise in style. But even the style is wrong. Power suits and ties wouldn't be fashionable till the next decade. No real urban hipster in the 80's would be seen dead in a pinstripe. Designer jeans were what the heavy weights were sporting, even the upper crust. So the "look" is off, which leaves the substance to carry the project. What substance there is is vacuous, vapid, and very annoying.
The dialog is all stilted, awkward and overly literate - unnatural. It's like listening to a lit student read his or her first script. The acting is uneven and unfocused. No one seems to know what the point of this movie is, and all the talk and gestures don't add up to anything greater than themselves. It's just a series of smugly clever comments and shallow observations, but there's no direction to any of it. Chloë Sevigny is interesting to look at for a little bit but her "acting" is so flat and boring. Her partner, Kate Beckinsale, tries to do pump some life into the lame words she's given but there's only so much she can do with this corpse of a script. As wrong, and absurd, and demented as it was, Disco was a massive whale of an international phenomenon, but you'd never know it from this puny limp fish of a failure.
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