PREMIERE.COM REVIEW

Hollywood has recently welcomed in a new film genre with open arms. It's a variation on the biopic that should be called the bio-ick — as in its subject is downright shower-inducing, may-need-an-airsick-bag icky. Fitting nicely alongside the recent bio-ick Auto Focus is this underachieving mess, which also marks the directorial debut of George Clooney.

Confessions tells the story of game show impresario and alleged CIA hit man Chuck Barris. You may be saying, "Wow, I didn't know that doofus from The Gong Show was so deserving of a film." Well, he isn't, and that is the main flaw in this movie. Yes, Sam Rockwell is extremely convincing as Barris, and Clooney demonstrates some flair from behind the camera, but all this is overshadowed by the fact that Barris doesn't come off as the complex, troubled figure he is intended to be, but rather as a sniveling bore. Even if he is the murderer the film and the autobiography it is based on lead one to believe, it seems from watching that the most despicable crimes against humanity he committed were creating Gong and The Dating Game.

Screenwriting it-boy Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) provides the script, which has several soon-to-be-classic lines such as "He was a good guy even though he was a prick" and "I'm not killing people — my future's in television." Presumably, this material should be perfect for Kaufman's surrealist mentality, but even he is dragged down by the weightiness of the story's insignificance. Kaufman is far more clever and bizarre when he is left to his own imagination, and not held captive by mediocre subject matter.

—Jason Matloff