54

SYNOPSIS:
Shane O'Shea (Ryan Phillippe) is 19 and bored by the local nightlife in New Jersey. He ends up standing outside Studio 54, trying to get in. The club's owner, Steve Rubell (Mike Myers), is taken by the young man's good looks and waves him through. Soon Shane joins the ranks of bare-chested busboys working under the strobe lights. He makes friends with a coworker, Greg (Brecklin Meyer), who is married to a coat-check girl and would-be singer, Anita (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile, Shane's favouritism by Rubell and a prominent socialite (Sela Ward) puts him on the fast track. It's not long before he is promoted from busboy to bartender, and gets all the women and drugs he wants. He has set his sights on a soap opera actress, Julie Black (Neve Campbell), whom he has long admired from afar.

"It's no surprise that this mostly fascinating drama received such mixed reviews. As a recently history lesson, it's more fantasy than history, an idealised interpretation of an era that was excessively self-indulgent, even downright silly. 54 is an intoxicating look at a few years of utter garishness. Though the film has certain annoyances and silly plot contrivances, it remains a surprising entertaining and biting funny look at the period, and the club that personified all that was wrong with the late seventies and early eighties. Writer/director Mark Christopher has a far better visual eye than he does a sense of character, and cinematically, 54 is stunning. As well as his attention to period detail, his scenes in the club are intoxicating, as they so deftly define the garishness of that whole scene. His sense of character is less interesting, offering a sketchy account of these strangely idiosyncratic people, and the central character, Shane, is very thin on the ground, played with bland indifference by newcomer Ryan Phillippe. On the acting front, real honours go first to Mike Myers, who gives a superb, indomitable and complex performance as the often drugged-out Steve Rubell, while Salma Hayek is both breathtaking to watch and emotionally resonant as aspiring singer Anita (and she does her own singing which is great). Though short on historical accuracy and well-defined character, 54 is an entertaining reminder of how facile the disco era really was, and what clubs such as 54, really represented."
Paul Fischer