how typical ! joel schumacher , who is currently destabilizing , dismantling , and destroying the batman franchise , has taken a different turn , definitely not for the better with his latest effort ( ha ! ) entitled '8mm' . once again schumacher ( who should be relegated to directing t . v . commercials and music videos ) pushes us away instead , and instead of drawing us in , he makes the fatal mistake of handing the audience a movie that has too much literal meaning and not enough space to let the audience digest one course before he crams another down our throats . it would have been a pleasant experience to see this film use violence , pornography and psychotic lunatics as a metaphor for a missing persons case that had great potential contained within its story line . but instead , schumacher and writer andrew kevin walker ( 'seven' ) , have given us a movie that is as pleasant as going through a fun house with actual booby traps rigged to literally kill you . nicolas cage stars as a pittsburgh private investigator who takes a case offered to him by a wealthy widow and her business manager/attorney ( anthony heald ) . the woman's husband was an industrial czar . upon settling his estate a strange 8mm film exists that was in his possession that basically turns out to be a sadistic porno film where a young woman is sexually tortured . it's not certain that she was murdered which is the thrust of the case : to find out if she was . cage finds the girl's mother ( amy morton ) who wants answers in the disappearance of her daughter . his investigation of the case takes him to los angeles where he meets a porno shop employee ( joaquin phoenix ) who helps cage find disruptive and illegal material in porno's sickest places where the young woman in question may have been photographed . cage's search also takes him to new york where he encounters some seedy and unspeakably evil porno peddlers ( james gandolfini and peter stormare ) who turn out to be killers in disguise . 1989's 'field of dreams' is not a baseball film . it used baseball as a poetic metaphor to help a man " ease his pain " and redeem himself . it's probably the best film in the last decade to find a subject like baseball , and use it as a metaphor to project the image of good story telling . '8mm' goes right for the jugular in all the wrong ways and looks a lot like a big budget porno film and can be described as a movie becoming a victim of its own subject matter that wallows in the excess of its own seediness and has little room for the audience to react in anything more than standard fashion . the film at times just seems to be going through the motions with wooden direction , a bland performance by cage and a clandestine feeling of being trapped --- already experienced by 1995's 'seven' . another problem with this film is its editing . it's too static at times and too quick at other times and comes across as very sloppy and uneven . some of the situations and dialogue are also absurd . we see that cage has a wife ( catherine keener ) and baby daughter and his wife is constantly showing her faithful traits towards her husband and supports him in his career and later in the film , she threatens to leave him if his work continues to dominate his life . a bit much after showing her support earlier in the film . it seems totally out of character for her and a contradiction on the writer's part . big , brooding , and unpleasant without making you feel entertained are just some ways to describe '8mm' which is artificial entertainment disguised as a wannabe thriller that had audiences i saw with it , bolt for the door upon the first closing credit on the screen . 
