CINEMA: Toothless: Interview with the Vampire falls flat, despite Tom Cruise

Why would Tom Cruise be playing Lestat, a gaunt, suave European vampire with a taste for young men? Because a big movie star can do whatever he wants. And why would Neil Jordan be directing Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles? Because his signature films, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, are gay fables with mass appeal. Once again he has a sympathetic fellow (here it's Brad Pitt as Louis, a New Orleans landowner in the 18th century) falling in with a charismatic homosexual (Cruise's Lestat). Louis tells his story to a young interviewer (Christian Slater) in a sort of Donahue with spooky flashbacks.

So far, so promising. In Anne Rice's screenplay, which she adapted from her megaselling 1976 novel, Lestat and his crew are displaced aristocrats, glorious anachronisms. They are enslaved by bloodlust: every night a little death. They lean into the victims' necks and give them the hickey from hell, the infernal overbite -- the kiss that bleeds. The nightly rampages of these putty-faced predators suggest an aids metaphor: voluptuous sexuality with fatal consequences. And after a couple of hundred years, the vampires get the edgy sourness of people married too long.

It's a cute idea to have Cruise, the movies' all-American guy, gussied up like Pierre Clementi, protopunk of French art films. It's a bad idea to let Cruise vanish for almost an hour in the middle of his picture. But by then the film's central flaw has been exposed. A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite.