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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 09/26/1996,

2 Days in the Valley

Maybe there's a conspiracy afoot in Hollywood to undermine independent filmmaking by releasing films such as the recent, woeful Feeling Minnesota or the excruciatingly smug and synthetic 2 Days in the Valley. Written and directed by newcomer John Herzfeld, Valley features an impressive cast who somehow were deluded into thinking this a worthy and original small project. James Spader plays a slick hitman with a fetish for stopwatches, Danny Aiello is his hapless partner with a penchant for the "f" word, Jeff Daniels and Eric Stoltz are a pair of dysfunctional vice cops, Teri Hatcher is the seemingly bereaved widow of a murdered ex-husband, Charlize Theron is a lethal bimbo who looks great in spandex and can throw a mean punch, and Paul Mazursky is typecast as a washed-up director with apologies to Umberto D. How do these disparate lives interconnect over two days in the San Fernando Valley? If you took a pencil and connected their names with dotted lines, you'd come up with a solution far more convincing and a lot less pretentious than this meretricious exercise.

-- Peter Keough