As countless films have shown, love, sex, and relationships seem to be much more interesting when set before the backdrop of the Big Apple, where the melting pot of personalities and lifestyles is often used as a catalyst for complicated romance. Edward Burns' latest film, Sidewalks of New York, tries to be another one of these movies, but instead succeeds at proving that there actually are some tangled webs of romance in Manhattan that are just plain boring.
Burns follows six New Yorkers whose paths cross through their experiences with love, sex, dating, marriage, infidelity and divorce. The cast of characters includes television producer Tommy (Burns), who meets and dates schoolteacher Maria (Rosario Dawson), recently divorced from doorman/guitarist Ben (David Krumholtz), who is in love with NYU student/waitress Ashley (Brittany Murphy), the mistress of middle-aged dentist Griffin (Stanley Tucci), the husband of real-estate agent Annie (Heather Graham). The film is shot documentary-style so the audience can see the sparks fly and tempers flare and then listen to the participants try to analyze what the hell is going on.
It is obvious that Burns wants Sidewalks to be a serious, unbiased outlook on the trials and tribulations of love in the big city, but neither the drama nor the humor is clever enough to bring the film to the intellectual level on which it pretends to be. The screenplay is a mix of a bad Woody Allen movie and a weak episode of Seinfeld, and the acting, while decent, is for the most part unconvincing. That's not to say the film doesn't have its highlights--it does, especially in the small but hilarious performance of Dennis Farina as a millionaire mentor to Tommy--but Sidewalks of New York fails at making any of its characters real or alive enough for the audience to care about what happens to them.
