Wonderland

Val Kilmer plays a drugged-up, bottomed-out John Holmes in this loose retelling of 1981's brutal Wonderland murder case. In presenting a number of competing perspectives on what exactly led to the killings, including several mildly different interpretations of the same scene, the idea is to leave ultimate judgment to the audience. Instead, the lack of conviction just results in a hazy, jumbled, inconclusive mess of rumor and uncertainty. Kilmer is miscast as the shady, self-serving loser at the end of his rope, and keeps trying to turn on the charisma when he should be cowering and sniveling. His big-name supporting cast produces similarly phoned-in performances, while a glut of gimmicky after effects gives the whole picture the kind of sparkly, overproduced sheen that's usually reserved for car commercials. A drab, ambiguous, morally vacant jumble that rides its barely-famous subjects' coat tails for as long as it can.