What? No Auto Focus thread? Saw this a few months ago, and the film opens nationwide, I believe, Nov. 1. My official review (the grammatically correct one, will be posted later this week)
This film is a biopic on Bob Crane’s life, and while I’m a fan of Hogan’s Heroes and was really excited to see this, I was let down by it. The film is well directed, the cinematography is supurb, the acting is fine, and the script is “ok”. The problem with this film is two-fold:
1) Never once during the entire thing do you get the feeling that you are watching a true biography about a man’s life. Much like Ali, you feel like you are watching an E! True Hollywood story, with everyone reenacting well-known “public” events, you never really get a “sense” of what makes Bob Crane tick.
What you see is someone going through the motions as though he is an outsider looking into his own life. Now maybe the real Bob Crane was like this, but to be a documentary film, the audience needs to get find out what motivates and drives the subject and this film doesn’t deliver.
2) The casting just seems completely wrong for this film. The acting was wildly diverse from good (Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe) to horrible (the entire miscast Hogan’s Heroes imitators), no one fit their parts – with maybe the exception of Dafoe. Never once in this film do you buy Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, and can someone please tell me what the heck was that weird accent he was trying to do?
Then the film did several horrendous, HORRENDOUS, reenactments of scenes from Hogan’s Heroes. Not one of the actors fit the parts, and it takes you out of the film, everytime they switched to those moments. Did I mention how bad these were?
Overall, Auto Focus was simply disappointing, it’s a film that I would like to see again, because if nothing else, and was an intriguing film that holds your attention, despite all its flaws.
Auto Focus could have succeeded, if it wasn’t striving to be a biopic but instead a fictional account about a man who ruined his career because of his addiction to sex. All the elements were in place to make that story, and if you watch Auto Focus with that in mind, you’ll enjoy the film more, than if you watch it thinking that this is a biopic about Bob Crane. I would probably go with a C+.
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