New York Minute

Directed by Dennie Gordon, New York Minute follows twin sisters Jane (Ashley Olsen) and Roxy (Mary-Kate Olsen) as they get into a series of wacky misadventures on the way to Manhattan – where Jane is slated to deliver an important speech and Roxy hopes to hand her band’s demo tape to music-industry insiders. Filmmaker Gordon, working from Emily Fox, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage’s screenplay, delivers a pervasively (and aggressively) mindless comedy that admittedly moves at a brisk pace yet contains few, if any, elements worth embracing, and it goes without saying, certainly, that Gordon’s frenetic, teen-friendly approach to the material goes a long way towards slowly-but-surely alienating older viewers – with the movie’s relentlessly over-the-top sensibilities rendering its seemingly positive attributes moot. (This is especially true of Eugene Levy’s turn as the truant officer pursuing Jane and Roxy, as the actor delivers a broad, grating performance that’s ultimately emblematic of the movie’s less-than-subtle atmosphere.) And although the Olsen siblings are probably more personable than the film deserves, particularly when compared to several of their far-from-ingratiating costars, New York Minute is, for the most part, a bottom-of-the-barrel star vehicle that doesn’t entirely, at any point, justify its very existence.

*1/2 out of ****