Very Bad Things

The half-farcical litany of very bad things in ''Very Bad Things'' starts off with particularly Vegas bad things. Peter Berg's new-to-tape feature directorial debut finds five California suburbanites availing themselves of all the sins Sin City has to offer. The occasion is a bachelor party on the eve of the marriage of a neurotic Jon Favreau to a pathologically fussy Cameron Diaz. The boys drink, take drugs, gamble, and receive a hotel room visit from a lap-dancing hooker. In other words, they cast off workaday repression for the decadent dream of the Vegas oasis.

Trouble is, we've seen it all before, the Nevada mecca as Hyde to America's Jekyll, as the country's exaggerated shadowland. ''Very Bad Things'' is among the complacent multitude of movies, novels, and stand-up routines that irritatingly reiterate Las Vegas' dead-end outrageousness while telling tales that could easily be set anywhere else.

''Very Bad Things'' aspires to subversion when overenthusiastic party guest Jeremy Piven accidentally pierces the poor working girl's skull with a towel hook. Homicidal high jinks ensue, flatly. But the flick is no more or less subversive than the obscene requests of ''Indecent Proposal,'' the wink-wink send-ups of ''Mars Attacks!,'' the junior Rat Pack joyrides of Doug Liman's ''Swingers'' and ''Go.'' Even ''Showgirls,'' a movie destined to be remembered as one of the worst of the decade, grinds home the idea that L.V. and L.A. -- and, by extension, the USA -- are corrupt frontiers.

You Might Also Like

• Movie Review empty shell
• Movie Review Very Bad Things;Ringmaster (Nov 25, 1998) | Owen Gleiberman
• TV Review Survivor | Ken Tucker
• Movie Review Very Bad Things | Owen Gleiberman
• Television News All Access on ''Survivor: Cook Islands'' | Dalton Ross
• Television News New ''Survivor'' will be a battle of the races | Dalton Ross