A sort of “Babel” of bonking, “360” gives us much in the way of international anguish, frustrated coupling and longing stares, but there’s very little plausibility or genuine emotion in its egregiously contrived story of ardor gone amiss.
Having a go at yet another adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 sex play “La Ronde,” the decreasingly interesting screenwriter Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon”) conjures up cloddish segues between an auto executive (Jude Law) contemplating a liaison with a hooker, the man’s neglected wife (Rachel Weisz), who’s having a loveless affair with a sexy photographer (Juliano Cazarre), and the photographer’s girlfriend (Maria Flor), who strikes up a friendship with a lonely dad (Anthony Hopkins) on an airplane and flirts with a convicted sex offender (Ben Foster) in an airport.
The movie is about connection, but as Morgan scurries around various cities in Europe and America, he’s in such a hurry to get to his next episode of trite misery that he simply staples one situation to the next. The phoniness is most unbearable in the episode built around Foster, a bad actor whose career is a study in how to ruin already-bad movies by trying to burn holes through the scenery with your eyes. Foster’s hunched, furtive, twisted little perv is about the last man in the world a beautiful woman would randomly offer a glass of wine to in an airport, and yet she does because the movie needs these two to spend a couple of long scenes together so it can whip up some ersatz tension over whether he attacks her.
The dialogue’s insistent banality (“I can’t do this anymore,” “You only live once”) is worsened by the dreary, frequent-flier-miles-collecting globalism that Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles confuses with profundity. Meirelles’ career is on a greased downward slope, and accelerating — from “City of God” to “The Constant Gardener” to “Blindness” to this. Pretension, contrivance and cliché seem to be all he has left.