Peter Howell bitching out 54 in the Toronto Star (1998.08.28):
[M]ost of the blame goes to writer/director Mark Christopher, who was a lot less ready to helm his first feature than Miramax had assumed.
Christopher can’t shoot a dance scene to save his life – he keeps cutting away, as if afraid to face the music – and his screenplay lacks focus…. Christopher’s insipid script doesn’t allow him to say much, either. What he does say is laughably stupid….
The weirdest thing about this movie is how tame it is…. It almost seems as if Christopher was trying to make a movie that could be shown as is on airplanes, without a single edit.
In actual fact, Harvey fucking Weinstein et al. hacked the movie for a disastrously misidentified literal bridge-and-tunnel audience and demanded expensive reshoots.
Mark Christopher today: “I was raised on a farm and you always finish the job you begin no matter what happens, even if a tornado goes through. That’s sort of my work ethic. It was painful, but what are you going to do? I mean, what is painful is for the critics to blame you. That’s painful. But what are you going to do?”