This was one of the very few films to shoot in my old home town of Fairbanks, Alaska and I even slightly assisted with the film being in local video production at the time. Many years later, I managed to track down a rare copy and have to say that, even having previously read the script, I was heartily underwhelmed. For one, most of the characters feel awfully hollow and unexplored. We get that the central character is a deeply lonely and disturbed abuse survivor who turns to abuse himself with alcohol while working a miserable job driving taxis, but things never really break the surface level. Disappointingly, they don't even broadly cover the film's potentially colorful environment.
While I cracked up seeing the actual "Eagle Cab" taxi company cooperate so fully with the production and supply a couple of their signature GMC Taxi vans, as well as see a few familiar Fairbanks landmarks (though not even to the same level INTO THE WILD did), I couldn't help but feel that this film barely scratched the surface. Fairbanks is one of the most surreal cities in America, subjected to the harshest climate you can imagine (at least in the winter, anyway), it's the nearest civilization to the vast North Slope oil and home to two major military bases and a university. It seems to me you could easily dig into the dreamlike desolation and depict the strange atmosphere of rugged frontier life, the massive imbalance of men-to-women, the hopelessness of the arctic winter, the isolation, and the loneliness of young men who live there. However this film gets sidetracked into a few dysfunctional relationships heavily weighted down by banalities and many scenes with no advancement to the plot (which is pretty thin).
While it's neat that they filmed a lot of interiors at a real Fairbanks bar, The Boatel, the film seldom leaves its environs. There's a section where the main character gets whisked away to a mental asylum but this section clearly wasn't filmed in Fairbanks and also happens to be where we see most of the film's bigger stars. Afterward, the film sadly doesn't really get out and do much exploration of Fairbanks or the local culture. It's a lot more focused on drama between a few characters which never really rises beyond the level of cliche and never feels authentic.
A pretty clear flaw is that the leading lady, a stripper, was written in the script as being overweight. They didn't seem to find a willing overweight actress for the part, but the one they did cast was a little too old to believably be a successful stripper, even in Alaska. Therefore, it would have been an easy rewrite to change her struggle from being overweight to being past her prime, but the filmmakers strangely stuck to their guns, I assume to be kinder to the actress. It unfortunately shreds whatever authenticity that they were trying to build. It doesn't help that none of the characters are that likable or relatable either.
Overall this film will likely get forgotten due to its very limited appeal and significant shortcomings. It does however hint at a much better film that someday really could explore what life is like in Fairbanks, Alaska bar culture, which had more than its share of drama and chaos from what I observed in my short time living there.
