2 Days in the Valley (1996)

Synopsis: Several characters cross path: a cold-blooded killer, his older assistant, an Olympic skater, the killer's girlfriend, an unemployed film director, a TV producer, his secretary, two vice cops. 

Appraisal: This film appears at first to be trying to pack too much material into the same film, but as the film goes along the parts start to fit together (well, most of them anyway) and the result gets very entertaining, with some laughs and thrills along the way. On a deeper level, the film is basically about how people are driven by desire and ambition, and how some persevere and others get too tired to do it, but perhaps shouldn't. Its underlying framework is a society that judges people by what they have achieved, and not by their intrinsic human value. "Losers have more honor than winners", one character says at one point. It is a sentence that makes one think. Well, it should, anyway. 

Rating: 63