Did you ever say to yourself, “Hey, I haven’t seen a famous Sandra Bullock film in a while. I wonder what’s available on Netflix, starring Sandra Bullock, circa 2000?”
That’s not quite happened here, but I did happen to see 28 Days available for streaming / “instantaneous visual consumption” on Netflix earlier this month, so I thought it would be worth 103 minutes of my time. This is one of her early films from 2000, playing a young woman from NYC named Gwen with some fairly serious binging issues. The film sets up the story with an interesting / slightly heavy-handed introduction. She’s out on some late 1990’s style bender at a late 1990’s cliched visualization of a night club. I didn’t really do too much clubbing back in the day, but whatever one she was in, looked more Los Angeles than New York. Anyways…… she stays fairly drunk throughout her sister’s wedding (as a bridesmaid), and causes quite a mess of the wedding. She eventually steals a limo, wrecks it, and is offered either a jail term or 28 days at a drug and alcohol rehab center somewhere in the woods.
She is, of course, rather unwilling and unrepentant alcoholic, so much of the film is her bucking and fighting her confinement at a center where she doesn’t believe she belongs. I’ll say that Sandra Bullock was alright in this film, but the film as a whole felt like more of a tv-movie, and less of a great theatrical film. Also, while Sandra Bullock normally comes across the role of the “every woman”, she still looked a bit too glamorous to be a Manhattan-based newspaper columnist. I made it through the entire film, but I wasn’t all that wowed by either the acting or the story line. It just felt too much like, “Hey, it’s Sandra Bullock as a woman in rehab!” I don’t know — it was the little things about this film that pulled me out from being engrossed in this film.
28 Days (2000)