Incident at Loch Ness (2004)

It's at times like this that I kind of wish I used the Charles Francois rating scale, because few movies deserve a B-/C+ more than this one. The veracity of the film is not really an issue -- I had it pegged for hooey during the opening party scene, which features Ricky Jay performing a card trick and Jeff Goldblum as "Jeff Goldblum." What's interesting about this film is that it uses the devices and structures of the mockumentary genre to examine the underlying struggle between truth and fiction in not only this weak-ass genre but, by extension, all "true-story" films. It constructs an artificial world (featuring a man who often delights in blurring the lines between true and false), but one that closely resembles ours to the point where the fantastical finale feels like it could have happened even if it clearly didn't. So where is the dividing line between true and false? Think about Incident at Loch Ness, and one must also consider Nanook of the North and Land Without Bread and Touching the Void and Dadetown, among others. That's the point: Can you trust your own perceptions when you are told something is "true?" So yeah, the subtext is there; shame, then, about the text itself. I submit that, if anyone else had written this, it could have been genius. But our scribe (and director) is Zak Penn, who on-screen quite happily crows about having written Last Action Hero and Suspect Zero. That should give you some idea about how clumsy and obvious a lot of this film is. It's intermittently interesting and occasionally quite funny. But it's still mock-clever, a Hollywood hotshot's atrophied idea of what a hoodwink should be. Werner Herzog, at least, is one hell of a good sport.

Grade: C+