Here's what another reviewer had to say about Rated X for indieWIRE Daily: "For a movie teeming with sex, drugs and a dollop of violence, Emilio Estevez's ‘Rated X' is conspicuously flaccid. With none of the creative energy of ‘Boogie Nights' or the compelling characters of ‘The People versus Larry Flynt,' this run-of-the mill biopic about the rise and fall of the Mitchell Brothers, is a quintessentially made for TV experience. Distributed by Showtime Network, which boasts ‘no limits,' the film, despite its plenteous nudity and sex, lacks edge and is hopelessly marred.
Look alike real life brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play Jim and Artie Mitchell, a couple of close knit brothers who embark on a career of innovative pornography in the 70s and 80s in San Francisco. But the picture, with a snoozer of a screenplay by David McCumber and Norman Snider, offers no insight into what, in fact, were the ground breaking elements of the Mitchell's particular brand of fuck flicks. Insight, in fact, is absent altogether in the face value flick.
Early scenes clunkily establish Jim, the elder as a protective older brother who saves Artie from an array of tangles including ones with their tough-guy pop (Terry O'Quinn). This over-stressed dynamic continues through their lives, until, ultimately, Jim stops saving his brother.
Once in freewheeling Frisco, the groovy, mod brothers begin to make porn with a gaggle of hippie helpers including Jim's girlfriend who will disappear from the film within a few scenes with scant explanation. One never really gets to know any of the characters in "Rated X" and women come and go, without ever mustering much personality. But neither do the brothers Mitchell. Estevez's Jim, is rather bland, his concerns for Artie's excesses is his main feature. Sheen plays the frenetic, coked-up Artie, but neither character intrigues. The storyline ticks of biographical facts in a perfunctory and uninspired manner, from Jim's college film course to Artie's multiple marriages. As their stars rise and the money and publicity cascades in, cocaine becomes a constant presence and much footage is spent on the snorting. Fame followed by drugs and a cataclysmic spin out of control is tired formula and Estevez's thoroughly uncreative approach puts the banal plot front and center and the dull-as-dishwater dialogue leaves one clamoring for the remote control.
The X oeuvre "Beyond the Green Door" gives the filmmakers cash and cachet, but its exceptional qualities are never made plain. Its star, Marilyn Chambers [played by Tracy Hutson], is a somewhatrefreshing female in this tale, who shrewdly demands a hefty sum. Though she seems to make and shake their world, she too disappears without a trace in this slipshod picture. The Mitchell's enlist the FBI to help them battle the mob, but this, more interesting component, is left to dangle.
Estevez does not incorporate the tenor of the times to his advantage. Hairstyles and duds communicate the 70s in San Francisco, but the soundtrack is largely generic and the social upheavals and politics are merely glimpsed at. A small band of women protest pornography in the late 70s, but the subject of feminist response to porn is given short shrift. The shifting, lopsided camera angles and a good rainstorm strive to infuse tension at the climax, but the brother's final standoff is unmoving. We've been given no good reason to give a hoot about either bald pornographer."
