It's another movie about an Everyman who is thrust into the eye of instant pop fame by being a hostage in a nationally televised incident. First he enjoys the superficiality of the fame, then.....
In other words, it's mostly like a dozen other films that address this theme, just a little differently. This one's a little more deft at dishing out the satire and irony, despite rocking hard those product placements that films relied on in the 90s, in this case, heineken, which we see too many times to count. Since it was an new emerging director at the time, there's a lot of emphasis on attempts to produce fresh, thoughtful imagery. It's a commentary on the meaninglessness of popular reality tv, which was new then, albeit in the mid-1990s. It's hard to remember in 2021 how new we were to instant-reality-tv fame, and when, despite our addiction to it, we also still seemed to know how tasteless it was, before it became part of our ever-present background via social media. A little of EdTV meets Natural Born Killers, with a pretty and then-promising young Stephen Dorff, and a pretty and cute-as-a-button young Reese Witherspoon.
Kudos for not being afraid to show lower middle-class white Southern California the way it really was and is, without all the California/Los Angeles/Beach cliches that audiences lazily expect. Also kudos for showing the character of Spab as a real life character that he probably should be -- aimless, ambitionless, talentless, but redeemed by innate charisma, gift for gab, and good looks.
This is one of Dorff's better dramatic roles. Witherspoon, on the other hand, was not given much to work with, beyond being the "co-star." Busey, as usual for both he and his father, stole every scene he was in, which wasn't many.
