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Something like an Abel Ferrara take on
Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth, 3 A.M. is an interesting attempt at a movie, which
fails because it overstuffs itself. There are at least four plots here, each one jockeying
for attention and distracting from the others. One story would have been better
served as its own movie; another should have been excised entirely. Still, there are solid
moments, a lot of them, and they come at a steady pace—the movie never drags.
The action
centers around a failing New York taxi company. The owner, Box (Sarita Choudhury) is
struggling to keep it alive, but she’s hemhorraging drivers because there’s a
maniac out robbing and murdering them. In one story line, she is struggling to come up
with cash to bail the company out of its latest financial hole; at the same time the
screenplay follows the stories of three drivers.
The first is Hershey (Danny Glover), an ex-basketball player who’s
trying to keep his relationship with waitress George (Pam Grier) afloat, even though she
wants him to get a safer job. She’s constantly trying to fend off the advances of
Ralph, a construction worker played by Paul Calderon (probably the most underrated member
of this cast—his work is fine and subtle). This plot is somewhere between solid and
stolid; it’s familiar working-class-drama territory, but Grier and Glover have the
faces and the life-mileage to pull it off.
Another driver is Salgado, a troubled Latina tomboy played by troubled
Latina tomboy of the moment Michelle Rodriguez. Rodriguez is okay, but this is her third
movie in two years and she only plays one character—she ought to head to the video
store and bone up on Rosie Perez’s career, before it happens to her. The final plot,
and the most useless one of the bunch, is the story of Rasha (Sergej Trifunovic).
He’s a fugitive from Bosnia, a fact which is dropped in for no reason at all other
than possibly to insert some note of contemporaneity—without it, this movie could
easily have taken place anytime in the last twenty-five years. Its bleak, violent,
neon-spattered New York is yanked whole from Paul Schrader’s nightmares, with
virtually no screenplay concessions to Giuliani-era “reforms.”
This movie isn’t totally incoherent—most of the stories get
some kind of resolution, however tacked-on or slapdash they may seem (particularly the
Rasha plot, which uses a ridiculously nonchalant hit-and-run as its catalyst and then
almost literally goes nowhere). Rodriguez's story
could have been fascinating and suspenseful, had it been given 90 minutes to develop. The abuse and trauma of her
childhood have driven
her insane, and she believes a passenger she's picked up is the Devil. (All that's really wrong with him is some
unfortunate facial hair.) But the childhood trauma, just like
the hit-and-run and the robberies/murders, isn’t revealed with anything like impact.
Director and writer Lee Davis hasn’t quite figured out how to build drama. Plot
points just sort of lumber into view, shuffle from foot to foot, and then lumber offstage
again, and the viewer never quite cares. 3 A.M. makes you feel like you’ve
been up all night yourself—too bad its bleary, too-exhausted-to-make-sense feel
wasn’t intentional.
- Phil Freeman
