Apparently, this "Dorian," a.k.a. "Pact with the Devil," was a direct-to-video movie, and it shows. To call it an MTV-styled updating of Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of the Dorian Gray" doesn't fully describe how awfully irritating it is. For some reason, once-acclaimed actor Malcolm McDowell ("A Clockwork Orange" (1971)) and future two-time-Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz ("Inglorious Basterds" (2009), "Django Unchained" (2012)) are in it. They easily outshine the wretched demonstrations of so-called "acting" by the rest of the cast of amateurs--even though McDowell mostly butchers the epigrams of Wilde's Lord Henry, and Waltz plays a billionaire cuckold invented for this movie and who is rather superfluous to the main plot. There's a lot of yelling and shoving that's supposed to be drama. Wilde's words are replaced by illiterate drivel. At the least, the movie should've been edited down to a more tolerable short rather than a feature-length picture cluttered with time-lapse photography of traffic and cityscapes as transitions between just about every scene and with a distracting and obnoxious soundtrack also transitioning between and within just about every scene. In the one where Henry discovers two girls in Dorian's apartment, his voiceover is almost inaudible because of the blaring music. Instead of trimming, however, the jarring editing features temporal replays and sequences that look like trailers (the montage of Dorian and Bae's affair and the one of the billionaire's cuckolding).
I've seen every Dorian Gray movie I could find since reading Wilde's book, and although there's not many of them available (I've seen 10, including the loose reworkings such as this one), this is easily the most ineptly assembled of the lot. It seemingly has a few novel ideas, too, but blunders them all. There's potential for some clever structuring of the narrative, especially with McDowell and Waltz' characters. Both employ a form of surveillance: Waltz with the cameras capturing his cuckolding, and McDowell sneaking photographs like a peeping Tom. McDowell's Lord Henry is also the narrator, who in the movie's framing device is relating the main story to the detective. He also relates the outline of Wilde's novel to the Dorian in this movie. Plus, he has the omniscience of the Devil. But, nothing interesting comes of any of this.
Reworking Wilde's Faustian tale of eternal youth and doppelgänger images for the modeling business seems promising, too, as it did when the 1983 TV movie "The Sins of Dorian Gray" did the same thing. That version also had a female version of Basil, the artist who painted Dorian's portrait in the book. Here, she's Bae, the photographer. In both movies, Henry manages Dorian, and both are updated to contemporary times. Worst of all, both, through their partial gender reversals, are heteronormative debasings of the gay subtext of the book. Although, at least, this one contains some debauchery; it's flabbergasting how little is even hinted at in some of the other adaptations. A photographic portrait of Dorian instead of a painted one also has an antecedent in a 1915 silent film version, which still exists.
Ordinarily, I think I'd like the use of mirrors here, too, including hiding the portrait behind one, but the movie is so poorly executed in every way, it's difficult to appreciate that there might've been some appealing concepts to begin with.
