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3 Needles

Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

While movies about cancer seem to come about as frequently as movies starring Scarlett Johansson, movies about the AIDS pandemic are rare. Released on World AIDS Awareness Day, 3 Needles is a movie which attempts to get its message across through a Babel-esque structure.

The film is split into three definite stories. The first, entitled ‘The Buddhists’ tells the tale of a black-market blood operative Jin Peng (Lucy Liu) who arrives at a small village in China and pretends to be sent from the Government. She offers the townsfolk money to give blood but through her irresponsibility she ends up infecting the entire townsfolk, including the family of Tong (Tanabadee Chokpikultong). After his wife and daughter both die, he decides he will uncover the truth.

The second segment is called ‘The Christians’ and concerns a porn actor Denys (Shawn Ashmore) who is HIV-positive but uses his father’s blood to fool the monthly tests. His carelessness ends up costing his family dearly and his mother (Stockard Channing) comes up with a shocking plan to solve their problems.

The final tale, called ‘The Pagans’, takes place in South Africa, where three missionaries (Chloe Sevigny, Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis) arrive to make sure the dying locals accept Jesus before they die. One missionary ends up becoming too involved with one family and finds she will do anything to protect them.

The most intelligent aspect of the movie is that the words HIV and AIDS are never once used throughout. Instead they are presented as a faceless disease that can strike in all different parts of the world to different cultures of people. With admirable intentions the film plods along, showing how the virus has struck in various ways, going against our expectations of how we may have assumed the film would progress.

For one, there’s no reference to homosexuality throughout and the characters who encounter AIDS are all from different walks of life. But good intentions can only go so far. 3 Needles is an earnest attempt to bring a worldwide crisis to the attention of cinema audiences but as a satisfying movie, it never totally convinces.

For one, its swamped on the big screen. It’s minuscule $3 million budget may have caught the talent and secured some decent locations but the production values are so poor that it really would have felt more at home on PBS. The music is toe-curlingly bad, ranging from inappropriately comedic to unconvincingly sweeping. Bad music really does help to take away from the rest of the movie and coupled with an awesomely cheesy narration from Olympia Dukakis, it helps to dull the overall message.

The cast are