15 Minutes [DVD]

Amazon.co.uk Review Fifteen Minutes partners Robert De Niro and Saving Private Ryan's Edward Burns in a thriller satire on America's "reality TV" industry. De Niro plays celebrity detective Eddie Fleming, who must reluctantly work with arson investigator Jordy Warsaw (Burns) when a grisly fire is discovered to conceal a murder. This is the work of Emil (Karel Roden) and Oleg (Oleg Taktarov), East European psychos bent on a maniacal spree of killings. All of these are videotaped by Emil, who renames himself after his hero Frank Capra, in a perverse tribute to the US of A, where "no one is responsible for what they do!". Soon the duo decide to sell their footage to Kelsey Grammer's creepily shameless frontline TV journalist. As a pair of loons whose scariness is just the right side of cardboard villainy, Roden and Taktarov steal the movie as well as their camcorder. However, the central theme of voyeurism and video murder was dealt with far more effectively in the 1992 Belgian movie Man Bites Dog and, while the action tears along in explosive fashion, it does so at the expense of both plausibility and the anti-media satire, which seems hitched crudely onto the bumper of what is essentially a satisfying but conventional blockbuster thriller. --David Stubbs Product Description Homicide detective Eddie Flemming (Robert De Niro) and arson specialist Jordy Warsaw (Edward Burns) are assigned to investigate a double murder in which the corpses have been partially burnt in a fire. They do their best to assess the evidence, but time is short, and things really hot up when the killers realise they can use the media to their own advantage. Carrying a video camera with them at all times, they tape everything they do, and when that involves commiting another murder, the chance arises to sell the footage to a television news show for a cool $1 million. The killers' fifteen minutes of fame might make them very rich indeed, but will it also lead to their arrest?