review for Rated X on AllMovie

Brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez always do well together onscreen; just check out their hilarious bickering in the underrated Men at Work. Like that film, Estevez directed Rated X, his adaptation of David McCumber's biography of porn kings Jim and Artie Mitchell. Here, there's an extra trait to link them in brotherhood, beyond the uncanny physical resemblance; both Sheen and Estevez sport ridiculous bald caps, the sheer artificiality of which makes it impossible to take seriously their depraved cocaine benders and violent rages. The whole film suffers from such surface flaws. Rated X thinks it's a decades-spanning tableau of the at-times glamorous, at-times tawdry, always narratively rich world of porn filmmaking, on the order of Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. But this small film can't hide its modest Showtime roots -- it has the inescapable aura of a TV movie, which is basically what it is, despite that Sundance screening. Sheen deserves credit for acting out drug binges that may have unfolded similarly in his own checkered past, but the scenes aren't anything we haven't seen in a dozen episodes of E: True Hollywood Stories. The problem also is that Jim and Artie Mitchell weren't particularly interesting either as showmen or human beings, so their story just lies there, flat, onscreen. Sheen and Estevez do complement each other well, but none of the other elements of this scattershot production can claim the same thing.