Sarah Michelle Gellar embodies Sorrow.
The Air I Breathe, a comically somber thing from newbie director Jieho Lee, is the kind of overblown mash-up that can happen when filmmakers lacking Babel-level talent aim for a complex, multi-character story with Big Themes.
In it, Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Kevin Bacon play characters that represent, respectively, what ancient Chinese proverb describes as the four pillars of life: Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow and Love.
Damned if director-cowriter Lee and screenwriter Bob DeRosa make it easy to tell the pillars apart, though, because of their muddy, contrived, clichéd, downbeat, symbol-heavy storytelling that throws some of the characters' fates together while others interrelate only casually.
Whitaker, a long, long way from The Last King of Scotland, plays a hemmed-in, timid stockbroker whose gambling debt gets him in way over his head with a powerful thug (Andy Garcia) but who eventually takes a surprising, action-packed route toward ultimate liberation.
Andy Garcia as Fingers
Then, there is Fraser as Garcia's psychic bodyguard and hit man who falls in love with played-out pop singer Gellar, freaked that her contract has been sold to the greedy Garcia.
Things get livelier (but only briefly) when Emile Hirsch pops in as Garcia's hot-wired, moronic nephew whom Fraser is assigned to keep out of trouble.
Bacon, meanwhile, sweats bullets searching for an antidote after the love of his life, his best friend's wife, (Julie Delpy) gets chomped by a snake.
The cast members do everything they can to step things up, but the whole affair is so dour and pretentious that, as it huffs and puffs to a trumped-up melodramatic conclusion, the air you breathe isn't fragrant with cinematic enlightenment but roaring pretentiousness.
