THE 24TH DAY
[] (One star)
Silly and stifling. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R (language and sexual dialogue, brief violence). At the Village East, Second Avenue and 12th Street.
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‘I work for a movie producer. I hear 20 stupid ideas a day,” declares a character in one of those line readings that practically begs for a knowing snicker from the audience.
“The 24th Day” – adapted by first-time director Tony Piccirillo from a play he began writing back in the early ’90s – boasts one of the most ludicrous plots ever committed to digital video.
It surely inhabits its own genre as a two-man chamber drama-slash-AIDS thriller, which dares to have a married, HIV-positive guy seek vengeance on a gay man with whom he shared a drunken one-night stand five years ago by – get this – tying him to a chair in his East Village walk-up while he forcibly extracts blood and sends it off for an AIDS test.
If the test comes back positive, the straight guy will kill the gay man and the thrills, ostensibly, come from wondering what the result will be.
The pair wile away the two-day interim endlessly chatting about football and school and their favorite Charlie’s Angel, and the movie is every bit as ridiculous – and surreptitiously homophobic – as it sounds on paper.
Worse, the entire, shoddy non-event is staged within the four walls of the dingy apartment, and the cinematography is so murky, it looks like it’s been filmed through dirty gauze.
Scott Speedman (“Underworld”) and James Marsden (“X-Men”) obviously relish the chance to play against pin-up types, but their enthusiasm is misplaced.