Metropia

Being that Metropia boasts technically innovative 2-D animation and Hollywood hipsters like Vincent Gallo handling voiceover duties, you'd hope the film would transcend tired dystopian-genre clichés. But this frigid bore of a glorified cartoon can't offer much more than smug, bleak futurism, with the added non-bonus of a ridiculous plot fashioned around the idea of governmental mind control via super-conductive dandruff shampoo. Metropia's setting is Europe, circa 2024, a depressing primer-colored place where fossil fuels are all but depleted and the continent is dependent on a single cross-country interlocked subway system, the Metro. Predictably, the sun never shines, no one has a sense of humor, and everyone lives in rundown high-rise towers. Roger (voiced by Gallo) is a product of this environment: a lifeless, impotent worker drone for an ominous corporation called Trexx. Roger becomes obsessed with the fetching model pictured on the label of his dandruff shampoo, and after washing his scalp, begins hearing instructive voices that aren't his. One day he spots this very same shampoo mascot, Nina (Juliette Lewis), in the Metro system, trailing her until she realizes she's being followed. Before long, poor Roger is lured into a vaguely dangerous government mind-control conspiracy in this clumsy paranoiac film, which aims to be a commentary on both our surveillance-obsessed society and the effects of globalization. Not recommended. (M. Sandlin)