Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.
Coincidence. Synchronicity. Fate. Movies like Magnolia, Crash and Babel tell us life’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, an interwoven cat’s cradle of chance, random incidents and interconnected destiny. The Air I Breathe is the latest entry in the Multi-Strand Ensemble Movie and it’s so preposterously pretentious it threatens respiratory failure.
Four lives are thrown together: Forest Whitaker’s desperate stockbroker gambles everything on an 8/1 cert and ends up in hock to vicious gangster ‘Fingers’ (Andy Garcia), who likes snipping debtors’ digits with secateurs. His enforcer is Brendan Fraser, a brooding hardman who has the ability to see (but not change) the future. His clairvoyance mainly gives him an edge when brawling in alleyways (“It’s like playing a videogame in your head; you know all the moves”). So far, so unusual. Then into the mix is thrown a troubled popstar (Sarah Michelle Gellar) whose dazzling beauty makes Fraser lose his powers of futurology; and a flaky ER doctor (Kevin Bacon) with just 24 hours to save his lost love (Julie Delpy) from a snake bite...
For this to work, the story blocks are supposed to fit together Tetris-style to make a greater whole. Except they don’t. Though Fraser’s future-haunted thug intrigues – his whorehouse ruck alongside the boss’s pussy-mad nephew (Emile Hirsch, outstanding) proves the movie’s sole highlight – debut director Jieho Lee shoots everything like it’s a Tommy Hilfiger ad and mainlines artistic pretension. Each character is named after the four pillars of life in Chinese philosophy: Happiness, Sorrow, Pleasure and Love (Garcia’s Fingers bucks the trend, but then his name’s already silly enough…).
Meanwhile, navel-gazing voiceover dialogue imitates self-help manuals (“Where does change come from and how do we recognise it when it does?”) and the glassy-eyed cast try to top one another in the over-acting stakes (Bacon wins hands down, his desperate doc bugging out with hysteria). Even at 95 minutes it’s a yawn-a-thon. Deep and meaningful? Stop and take a breath…
Four lives intersect to "so-what?" effect as wannabe auteur Lee tries to gate-Crash the multi-strand storytelling genre. More arse than art, it's only enlivened by Fraser's clairvoyant brawler. Pity his character didn't get more room to breathe.
