Fierce People

Director Griffin Dunne's adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour.

Whereas most of the injustices suffered by "Nanny's" nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.

The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

Fierce People is no ordinary dud. This seedy soap opera is the most outlandish, campy romp through the mud since "Showgirls."

What might have read as a dense allegory comparing the rituals of the super-rich with the tribal customs of the violent Ishkanani tribe in the Amazon becomes a tedious, over-ripe soap opera on screen.

Plays like a movie that some teenage boy cooked up in his chemistry lab. There are lots of potent things floating around in it - sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland - but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.