Ironically, one of the themes of 200 Cigarettes is that you should try to make the best of every moment in your life. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to say that I lived every moment of my life to the fullest because I spent 95 otherwise perfectly good minutes watching this sad excuse for a movie. Smoking 200 cigarettes in the same 95 minutes could not be any worse for you than watching a movie. Not only is it a pitifully bad movie overall, but 200 Cigarettes have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The plot is scattered, thin and predictable; the acting is monumentally bad, and the style of filmmaking is like a home video.
It's December 31, 1981, and the big party is at Monica's house (Martha Plimpton). But no one has yet arrived. Her eight guests and several people they've picked up all night wandering the streets of New York City in a variety of groups. Some of them know each other through their common bond of having slept with Monica, and some of them are strangers. But all of them have to face their neuroses before the end of the night.
Those who are invited are the ones with the issues. It's up to those who don't want to help them come to terms with it. First, there's Eric (Brian McCardie), a former friend of Monica's and is just getting past the heartbreak of their relationship that ends prematurely due to his sexual performance or lack of it. He is one of the most stupid characters in a film full of dullness, because he is so predictable and stereotypic, a common feature of this poor production.
Bridget (Nicole Parker) and Caitlyn (Angela Featherstone) are extremely sensitive young women looking for someone to take care of their wishes on New Year's Eve and tag a party with them. They stumble across a nameless bartender (Ben Affleck) who is the only truly perfect character in a film of imperfections. He is neither sexually deprived nor uncertain about his future, as he is in law school. His lack of flaws is boring, unrealistic and painful to watch. As Bridget and Caitlyn make passes to him, you are neither entertained nor humoured by the under-standard comedy.
Val (Christina Ricci) and Stephie (Gabby Hoffman) are two teenage girls with fake identification and very different thoughts. Val is a cousin of Monica and a true fan of the New York scene. On the other hand, Stephie is convinced that she is vulnerable to crime when the two venture out of their usual locations searching for a party that they can't find. Paradoxically, it's two punks that they meet at a bar (actually they try to flee from their presence, but they're not successful) that guide them through their fears and force a level of relaxation on their warped minds.
Of all the insanely dull and uninteresting couples, only one approaches a level of honesty in both acting and plotting. Wisely, the film's creators have emphasised Lucy (Courtney Love) and Kevin (Paul Sturdy) who are best friends and share the common bond of being dateless. Paul has just broken up with long-standing Ellie (Janeane Garofalo) and is starting to cope with his loss when Lucy informs him that Ellie had been sleeping around in their relationship. However, these two characters' only complexity is that they seem to want to be more than friends, and this is reiterated when they try sexual intercourse in a bathroom stall on more than one occasion.
Finally, there are the two worst performances and the worst part of the film. Jack (Jay Mohr) and Cindy (Kate Hudson) had been out for a short time, and Jack had just learned that he had taken Cindy's virginity the night before. While she's trying to play this down and be her usual self, he's a predictably self-loathing male as he tries to deal with a one-night string that includes the recently deflowered Cindy.
Very often, when a film is as putrid as this production, there will be at least a decent quality of filmmaking to reveal an occasional moment of glory. However, this film has neither the quality of cinematography nor the moments of glory to be highlighted. Instead, what you get is a collection of rough and inconsistent cuts, bad continuity and imprecision. The first and most noticeable is that as the film goes from one sub-plot to another, there is no apparent order that it follows, and needlessly edgy edits from the scene and shot to shot. At other times, objects seem to get up and move, and hairstyles and costumes vary from shot to shot.
And yet, no matter how miserable this film may be, and no matter how poor the acting is, there was a ray of hope for these many bad plots. Perhaps, suppose the makers had just decided to concentrate on one or two, or perhaps even three. In that case, there might have been time, and opportunity for some character development, or quality acting, or even a decent plot pay off at the end. But that wasn't the way it happened. The cast of high-quality name actors was forced into roles that not even one of them could turn into a mediocre performance, and every storyline crashed and burned faster than the ball dropped at midnight.
