The Thirteenth Floor

As Seen On TV

I try not to guess what is going on in a film, because I want the film to surprise and entertain me. I don't look too hard for clues that may or may not have been left in to wink at the audience, but sometimes you can't avoid them. When, early on in the film, a detective named McBain is introduced, my warning bells went off, and lead to my working out what was going on prior to the denouement. You see, the McBain series of detective novels are very well known, to the extent that there is no way that a detective would be named McBain in a film without it meaning something specific.

The Thirteenth Floor is an interesting film that had the misfortune to come out some time after The Matrix, which meant that its idea of people jacking in to a computer simulation where they interact with computer programmes would look tame in comparison with Keanu Reeves kicking butt in bullet time. The creator of the virtual reality has been enjoying his creation, but is killed shortly after exiting the world. His colleague and friend (Craig Berko) is in the frame, as he is left the company by the older man, who had been thinking of shutting it down. A mysterious daughter (Gretchen Mol) appears from nowhere to throw confusion on the matter, and Detective McBain is investigating. The simulated world holds the key to the answers of the murder, so Berko has to go into the world of 1930s LA to find it.

The film uses many of the tropes of the film noir genre, in both the original world and the simulation, with the hero in trouble with the law, the femme fatale, the dogged cop, but these are the things that give away the surprise ending (look away now if you don't want to know) that the story we have been watching is, in fact, another simulated world and that our hero is not real but a computer programme himself. This is a nice idea, and would have been more of a surprise if they hadn't called the detective McBain. The film recreates the world of '30s LA well, but there never feels any real cohesion between the characters, and Berko and Mol aren't brimming with charisma. The plot feels like a lukewarm retread of Chandler novels, and the 'jacking in' to the simulated world is a little on the embarrassing side, which doesn't make for a totally satisfying experience.

Rating: DA