Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A small, seemingly innocuous plastic reel of film leads surveillance specialist Tom Welles down an increasingly dark and frightening path. With the help of the streetwise Max, he relentlessly follows a bizarre trail of evidence to determine the fate of a complete stranger. As his work turns into obsession, he drifts farther and farther away from his wife, family and simple life as a small-town PI.
8MM is a grimly earnest neo-noir that takes its snuff-film premise seriously, giving it more moral weight than most exploitation thrillers. Cage is restrained and Hoffman steals scenes as Max, but the material never fully escapes its pulpy roots. Schumacher shoots the underworld with appropriately grimy shadows but without distinctive visual flair. The premise of a straight-laced PI descending into underground depravity was relatively fresh for mainstream cinema in 1999. The ending deflates the tension considerably — the resolution feels anticlimactic and the emotional fallout is handled too neatly given how dark the journey was.