Mel Gibson’s ‘The Million Dollar Hotel’ Is More Bizarre Than His Infamous Rant

The origin story for The Million Dollar Hotel all sounds so ludicrous, even on paper. Bono came up with an idea for a movie while filming the music video for U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” — filmed on the roof of a liquor store, not a hotel, in downtown Los Angeles — and then 13 years later, with a script adapted by Nicholas Klein, it was made into a movie. Directed by Wim Wenders, the German director best known for contemplative, elegant films like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas, the film starred a truly fascinating mishmash of twitchy character actors (Jeremy Davies! Amanda Plummer! Peter Stormare!) and headlined by a flat-topped, neck-braced Mel Gibson as an FBI agent investigating the death of the drug addicted son of a wealthy L.A. mogul. His investigation brings him to the titular Million Dollar Hotel, a seedy L.A. flophouse populated by a meticulously assembled collections of burnouts, weirdos, the mentally impaired, the drug addicted and the deranged.

Wenders was still a decently big deal as a director in 2000, having come off of directing the Oscar-nominated documentary The Buena Vista Social Club the year prior. Mel Gibson was less than five years removed from winning the Oscar for Braveheart and had the summer blockbuster The Patriot waiting in the wings. U2 was flying as high as they ever had. As odd a cocktail as the three of them seemed to be as a professional troika, there wasn’t any reason to think any one of them was a disastrous choice. But disaster is what awaited The Million Dollar Hotel upon its release. Things actually didn’t start out so bad when it premiered at the 2000 Berlin International Film Festival, where Wenders took the Jury Prize. But when it came time to hit the American marketplace in February, where it opened on only seven screens, expanded to ten the next week, and then was out of theaters by the third week, having made just around $53,000. Fifty-three THOUSAND. The reviews were awful too, calling the film non-sensical, lost, pretentious, and self-indulgent. Later, Gibson kicked up controversy on the Australian press tour (imagine!) when he called his own movie “boring as a dog’s ass.” When the star of the movie is slagging it so publicly, you know you have a true disaster on your hands.

So The Million Dollar Hotel kicked off the new century by establishing itself as one of the great bombs of the 2000s, living in infamy as a punchline for boring, ponderous movies by major talents. Bono never wrote another produced movie. As with all movies that attain such toxic reputations, of course, there comes a perverse fascination. Is this really as bad as its reputation? Many a cult classic has been born from this fascination (Showgirls, anyone?), so there are definitely rewards to seeking out the spectacularly shunned. On the occasion of The Million Dollar Hotel coming to Amazon Prime, I figured I’d investigate. Would it be a secretly fascinating car wreck worth making a case for? Or would it be boring as a dog’s ass? Only one way to find out.

Here’s what I discovered about The Million Dollar Hotel: Wim Wenders and Bono have some really cracked ideas about the romanticism of Los Angeles, of hotel living, of the burned-out remains of the just-completed American century. That sounds like there’s an idea in there, that the residents of the hotel are lost in time and space, dislodged from any place within the world as it exists. Jeremy Davies and Milla Jovovich play a pair of simple-minded quasi-lovers with horrendous haircuts. Jimmy Smits is a burned out ex-hippie. Gloria Stuart is halfway between Miss Havisham and a rapping granny who says “fucked up” three times in her first ten seconds on screen, just to make sure the audience knows that Old Rose from Titanic is dead and buried. Amanda Plummer is there, so you can pretty much imagine the unhinged theatrics she gets up to. Most irritatingly, there’s Peter Stormare who maybe thinks he’s John Lennon, speaks in an atrocious Liverpudlian accent, and is the subject of a criminal amount of Beatles puns. Into the midst of this Buñuel-meets-Dennis-Hopper-meets-Gregg-Araki-without-the-fun-gay-stuff amalgam of personalities comes Mel Gibson himself as an FBI agent investigating the death of another resident (later played in flashbacks and fantasias by Tim Roth), whose drug-addled death has his billionaire mogul father (Harris Yulin) wanting answers. Gibson’s character sports a flat-top, is fitted with a gleaming chrome neck brace, and is constantly wired for communication, like a Secret Service agent or a particularly self-important bouncer. Visually, he presents as half-machine, the future bearing down on these junkies who time forgot.

But that’s about as close as Wenders and Bono get to any kind of coherent statement, about the passage of time or Los Angeles or drugs or anything. The scenes themselves have a rubberneck value as you marvel at just how committed these actors are to alienating the audience at every turn, but it’s ultimately just a collage of sketches, like a really bad improv show where the theme is “the worst person I ever had to make conversation with at the L.A. DMV.” Gibson looks visibly uninterested, and while actors like Davies, Jovovich, and Plummer are all excellent, left to their own devices, they just burrow into their characters without anything to play off of.

If you wanted to turn The Million Dollar Hotel into a cult classic, you’d have a pretty hard time. There’s just not enough fun to be had, and, aside from Jimmy Smits hollering “GOD IS WHITE!” up to the frustrated heavens, there aren’t any big moments that stand out. It’s just Wim Wenders and Bono noodling around some ideas about oh, let’s say alienation, while the cast either indulges themselves or looks embarrassed. And all of that is done in such a minor key that it’s not all that thrilling to watch either. The Million Dollar Hotel is deeply bizarre and perhaps the most unsurprising bomb of the 21st century. It’s kind of amazing it made even $53,000 at all.

Stream The Million Dollar Hotel on Amazon Prime