Reviews

I never thought Fatal Attraction would look deep and intricate until I saw Obsessed. It really made me appreciate the work that went into the 1987 film. By comparison, and even by itself, Obsessed had almost nothing to it. Despite production credits that boasted Beyonce Knowles and Magic Johnson, it would have been weak even as a TV movie.

The only good thing about the film owed less to Fatal Attraction than to Disclosure. Obsession created a sketchy but interesting picture of just how much of a mess sexual harassment by a female employee could create for a good boss and family man when he did nothing wrong but circumstances conspired to make it look like he did.

Here, the guy was a young executive at a hard-working, hard-partying investment firm. A good-looking guy with a history as a "player," he married his last female office assistant. A sexy blonde temp is attracted to him, and his office buddy reacts with a "go for it" locker-room mentality. The exec has a lot to lose.

His wife is high-maintenance, strong-willed, and jealous, insisting that only male secretaries can work for him. Then his wife got even more touchy when her sister's marriage hit the rocks over infidelity. Another source of tension is that the exec is uncomfortable with his wife's plan to go back to school to "get her degree" (in what is not clear), now that their son was born.

At work, the exec is important to client relationships and to his firm's reputation. The temp uses her position (including listening in on his phone calls and manipulating his weakling permanent assistant) to get information about him. After several polite conversations, she suddenly became hyper-aggressive, ambushing the exec in a stall in the men's bathroom during an office holiday party (about the only scene in the movie with any real suspense, as to whether his co-workers would see and misinterpret what was going on) and in his car in the office parking garage. He rejected her and tried to discuss it with his wife, his buddy, and a human resources official, but for natural enough reasons ended up holding back each time. When the woman attempted suicide, after somehow secretly gaining access to his hotel room at a firm retreat, the situation blew up, with him looking terrible to his wife, co-workers, and police.

But the movie failed to develop the situation effectively or to take it anywhere. At crucial points in the story, the temp simply disappeared, either quitting work or being whisked away to another city by an unseen sister. Her actions did not build into a fast-paced, suspenseful sequence of events. Instead, even when reasonably well executed -- such as a visit to the exec's house to fool the babysitter into letting her get access to the baby -- they seemed aimless and disorganized. A prime example: the night before the suicide attempt, the temp drugged the guy senseless; in a confusing, dream-like sequence, she then showed up in his hotel room and got into bed with him. Nothing was ever made of this scene. Then the movie really fell apart, with little happening -- none of it surprising, interesting, or entertaining. This included a ridiculous, stagey, drawn-out catfight to the death between the wife and the scantily clad temp at the end. Musical sequences went on way too long in the movie and did not seem to fit. The pace was too slow.

Idris Elba was good, if somewhat wooden, with what he was given to do as the male lead. The temp was the thinnest of cardboard characters, a pure psycho with not a shred of depth or background or explanation for her behavior and with nothing meaningful to say or do. Frankly, I was embarrassed for Ali Lartner, who had nothing to work with in this film but her good looks. Beyonce seemed okay in the thin role of the wife until toward the end, when her lines and actions sunk to the worst of smack-mouth, tough-mama clichés. None of the supporting cast added anything worthwhile or memorable; all were let down by the weak material, especially the intelligent Christine Lahti looking pathetically ineffectual as a police detective.

I had hoped that this movie would be fun and interesting to watch. Instead, it was a near-total waste of time.

When I am in the mood for a fun, screwball comedy, it is nice to find a film by Saturday Night Live cast members. Over the years, I have missed a lot of these movies (all of Belushi, Adam Sandler, and Rob Schneider, much of Will Ferrell and Mike Myers and (fortunately) Bill Murray; plus Baby Mama, MacGruber, and others). And there have been some big disappointments (like Master of Disguise, Stuart Saves His Family). But I still look forward to the ones I am able to get to the theater to see. The latest was Bridesmaids, which generally received good reviews but which left me with mixed feelings. The plot is well summarized by other reviews, so I will not repeat it.

There were some funny scenes. Stand-outs include the bridesmaids trying on fancy gowns while being stricken with food poisoning from a diner Wiig took them to; Wiig acting crazy on a plane, or to vent her frustrations at the over-the-top bridal shower, or to get a patrolman's attention. Although crude at times, the movie mainly came across as cute, sweet, and genuine. Overall, the acting was good. Wiig's down-to-earth, slightly cranky policeman boyfriend stole the show. The characters were quirky but had real humanity. Only the narcissistic pig who Wiig spent the night with at the start of the movie was a total loser, and he got some well-deserved comeuppance (but not enough, due to a too low-key Wiig). Otherwise, the movie avoided mean-spirited or over-the-top caricaturing. Even Wiig's nemesis, her childhood friend Maya Rudolph's glitzy, seemingly perfect new friend, ended up being portrayed sympathetically as a decent person. The characters' actions, even when exaggerated for laughs, mostly seemed to flow naturally from who they were presented to be. The movie suggested the larger themes that life is what you make of it and that tomorrow is another day.

But the movie fell short. Qualities that made it endearing also held back and sapped its energy. It was too slight and understated, and its storytelling too choppy, slow, and uncertain (as, to some extent, was Wiig's acting; Rudolph was reduced to a totally straight role, with none of her normal spark). The film's scattered attempts to be serious and to send a message (including simply coasting on some easy-listening song lyrics toward the end) felt vague, superficial, and false.

For example, at a low point for Wiig, when she is hiding out at her mother's home depressed, a loud, crass bridesmaid who is Rudolph's groom's sister and appears to have no prior relationship and to have spent almost no time with Wiig, suddenly shows up and starts wrestling with her on the couch (to get her to show some spunk, we are told). But this key scene (which also includes the sister trashing the groom to Wiig for no reason and with no explanation) comes out of nowhere. There is no preparation for it in the character of this other bridesmaid or any familiarity or rapport between the two women. It is uncomfortable, drawn-out, and phony. Wiig, again acting far too subdued (as she does too often in the film), does not even seem to get it, or to take it anywhere. To chalk this up to Wiig's character's self esteem problems does not make it interesting or effective. Another example, also a key scene, is when the new friend's plans for a flamboyant, extravagant wedding finally become too much for Rudolph, who goes AWOL, returns to her roots, reconciles with Wiig, and says the whole thing has gotten out of hand and out of sync, financially and otherwise, with her family and friends. Yet, the movie bulled right ahead, as if the scene had never happened, to exactly the overblown wedding that Rudolph supposedly had come to realize was not true to who she is, just to squeeze laughs out of all of the excess and to close on a flashy note.

Nor did it help the movie that some of the gags did not flow naturally from the characters and story, but were gratuitous, silly, or pat. A small example was Wiig suddenly becoming childish after a serious scene with the policeman, giggling to him to run the siren, just to provide a light-hearted note to end on. A much worse example was the ill-fitting, baseless, tasteless scene about a sandwich that was tacked on to the end credits when it should have been left on the cutting room floor or for a deleted scenes disk.

These problems dragged down a movie that I wanted to like a lot more.

The film critics I've read have done an unusually good job discussing The Lincoln Lawyer, as I saw it. I will just hit the main points about the movie, pro and con, that made an impression on me. Overall, I thought the movie was well-acted, well-produced, and entertaining, even if limited by what might be called only a good TV-caliber screenplay.

The movie drew me in at the very start when the Lincoln town car of the title and its driver turned out not to be the phony Hollywood glitz I had expected but a seedy image that fit the movie perfectly. (One amateur review's complaint that the car somehow failed to serve its purpose simply because the title character drove around in other vehicles at various points is silly.) The well-acted characters and unusually dingy L.A. settings generally felt authentic, as far as they went. Matthew McConaughey fit naturally, smoothly, and effectively into the lead character of Mick Haller. Haller is a slick, shady L.A. criminal defense lawyer who gets results for his low-life clients, even if things do not always turn out for the best. Haller runs into serious problems, suffers blows from them, does not act always and mindlessly cocky (unlike the annoying, one-note young prosecutor-on-the-make in the movie Fracture), yet draws on enough strength, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that his confidence rarely fails him. This made him fun to watch. Sometimes, he stepped over the line, but not so far as to throw believability to the winds.

The story was basically interesting and tied up fairly neatly. In fact, it is quite an accomplishment to make a mystery thriller that was generally this entertaining and satisfying without going completely over the top, the way so many of these kind of movies do (such as The Firm, Final Analysis, Just Cause, Guilty as Sin, General's Daughter, and the Ashley Judd films Double Jeopardy and High Crimes). Lincoln Lawyer was refreshingly free of exploitative, sensational scenes used to gin up cheap shock value, horror, suspense, or titillation.

At the same time, I have to agree with the critics that the movie's story and characters do seem familiar. Although workmanlike, including the courtroom scenes, well-handled by McConaughey, the movie lacked the sparks of imagination, originality, intricacy, and electricity that can sometimes come from films like this. It did not really hit the high notes that make watching not just enjoyable but exciting. The writing, while good, seemed more like a script for a high-quality TV show than theatrical film. And some of the supporting characters, especially Haller's ex-wife and the bail bondsman, were badly under-developed and pasted on, wasting talented actors in nothing or contrived roles. Haller's interactions with his ex-wife were not convincing.

Similarly unconvincing was the degree to which he felt a crisis of conscience about the way he represented a past client in light of newly discovered information from representing his current, rich-boy client, accused of trying to beat to death a woman he met at a bar. Haller had more practical and selfish reasons for resolving the current case the way he did, without delving so deeply into soul-searching and noble motives, which seemed ill-suited to the rest of the movie.

I was looking forward to this movie, based on some enthusiastic word of mouth from a couple of acquaintances. As I stared at the screen with my expression becoming blank, then black, and without ever laughing out loud, all I could think of was that some movies make you look differently at the people who recommend them. "The Hangover" is a base, empty mess, wrapped in some slick packaging and hype.

I know the party line, from some, but certainly not other, reviews: the movie is a wild, gross-out fun ride that goes down smooth. Quirky buddies try to reconstruct a wild bachelor party night in Las Vegas after they black out and wake up the next day in their trashed hotel suite, with their friend the groom missing. They are a supposedly likable bunch of a weird-acting stoner slob, a dorky dentist with a domineering, unfaithful long-time girlfriend, an irresponsible, self-centered hunk, and a dour boy scout. In their adventures, they encounter colorful characters, like smart-mouth cops, a sleazy owner of a quickie wedding chapel, and Mike Tyson (magically rich, no longer bankrupt, with some canned eccentricities added).

The problem is that the movie does nothing but string together a series of gags -- either crude or violent or both -- that grow more and more depressing the clearer it becomes that everything about the movie is shallow, phony, and cliché. The missing night reconstructed over the course of the movie, with any remaining graphic details gratuitously laid on thick over the end credits, is strikingly unimaginative. (Drunken time with hookers; the drunk, hen-pecked dork marries a single-mom hooker with a heart of gold and then falls for her for real; the awkward slob as genius at cards; the groom swearing renewed, undying devotion to his fiancé; trashing fancy and cop cars; stuck-up, rich parents of the bride, totally wasting Jeffrey Tambor.) As to the mattress tossed from high up down on top of the hotel statue, it is an embarrassing plot contrivance, conveniently to delay finding the groom, that no one investigates until the last minute the source of the damage (including the police or hotel staff, who would know better than anyone that it was a hotel mattress, that none of the hotel windows open, and that hotel cameras would have picked it all up). The rush back to L.A. and happy endings are pat, forced, and uninteresting.

Like a self-indulgent child, the movie wants to have it both ways -- the buddies are supposed to be relatable, down-to-earth guys, yet somehow manage to reserve a $4500/night luxury Vegas "villa," come up with fancy clothes at will, and all have hot-looking girlfriends, wives, fiancés, or families. The movie goes for cheap laughs early on by having the slob say he has to stay away by law from schools and parks, yet later treats his carrying around a baby, even making lewd gestures with its hand, as all part of the fun. The same tendency is true of the film's use throughout of what it calls this "fat man" as a pratfalling, publicly urinating punching bag; turning him into an instant genius at cards; his casual talk about using the drug ecstasy; and the film's use of slurs to describe the dorky dentist. The hunk, portrayed as a jerk and not in the least believable as a "school teacher," suddenly becomes a devoted family man at the end, hanging all over his wife and son and later even carrying his sleeping son over his shoulder while he leers at cell phone pictures taken by one of his buddies of nude women they made out with in Vegas, as well as of the dentist's bloody, stupidly smiling face after drunkenly pulling out one of his front teeth that night on a dare. The movie does not even manage to convey any genuine sense of joy to the adventures, even as it seems to glorify them, including lots of senseless destruction (like trashing hotel rooms and cars, someone getting shot, an effeminate, foul-mouthed Asian beating people with a tire-iron, the tooth-pulling, etc.).

Add to this these points recently made by a print reviewer about the movie: "I didn't think 'The Hangover' was all that funny. It was too choppy, too mean-spirited and too much of an ensemble that didn't fit together as well as it should have." (As to the embarrassingly uncritical pass Roger Ebert gave this movie, like so many others, it only reminds me why I always liked Gene Siskel so much better.) Why sweat any of this? It's about drunken partying, right? Identify with it. Go with the flow. It's not about making sense or taking anything seriously. If that works for you, fine. Maybe this is one of those movies where someone likes almost everything or almost nothing. All a reviewer can do is explain why s/he feels one way or the other. For the reasons discussed, what is bad or weak about the movie so overwhelms anything good about it that the above excuses come across to this reviewer as just a convenient, lame cop-out. A cop-out here for failing to entertain in any meaningful sense of the word and in the process not merely disappointing, but spoiling the time of, plenty of people who were looking forward to a good time at the movies.

Apparently, this 2001 TV movie was made as a vehicle for Jane Seymour and her husband James Keach to executive produce a film, in which also she stars and he directs. The movie's backers undoubtedly expected that her presence and the mystery/suspense premise would cause viewers to tune in, maybe even be lulled into believing it was a quality project by the couple's overall personal involvement in it. I hope the people behind the film gained something from the experience. Because there was precious little in it for the audience.

Seymour plays a concerned wife and mother who aspires to be a discrimination lawyer. A hasty, early scene shows her attending class, where she modestly scribbles in her notebook the answer to a question from the professor that no one else in class can come up with, before scurrying out in mid-class to take a cell phone call from her teen-age daughter. The daughter chafes under her mother's attention and restrictions, complains about always having to take care of her sullen 10-year-old brother, and wants to go to "Woodbine Mall" that night to pick up her prom dress. Seymour insists on taking her, along with the brother (it will be at night and the mall is in "a bad part of town"). The son mopes and says little, mostly blurting out cynical assessments about his dad. The husband is under the gun financially, bottles up his emotions, and is uncomfortable talking to his kids about anything other than video games and shopping. He left a successful public relations agency to start his own firm with a partner. Their firm is now failing. Its ability to stave off bankruptcy probably depends on a dinner meeting that night with a prospective client that, we soon see in another slapdash scene, falls flat.

On the way to the mall during a rainstorm, Seymour and her kids stop in a long line at the Post Office, where she needs to drop off an overnight package of "bid" materials for her husband. In line, they cross paths with a pushy, weird-acting young man, who claims that he just wants to "help," be "considerate," and play by "the rules," but has to be thrown out for harassing Seymour and her daughter (who actually warms up to the jerk at first before Seymour sends her ahead to the mall by bus). Earlier, we had seen the weirdo leave his apartment. As he loudly and awkwardly shouted a wordy goodbye from the doorway over his shoulder and back into the apartment, supposedly to his mother within, a neighbor complained about a bad smell in the hall, guessing that a rat might have died in the building. After being ejected from the Post Office, the guy drives toward the mall, is cut off in traffic by another car, repeatedly rams the car, and abandons his own vehicle to scream at the other drivers and continue on foot.

Seymour, the kids, and the psycho converge on a mall clothing store. The daughter gets separated from the rest of the family when she quarrels with her mother, storms off to the dressing room, and the power goes out. The psycho skulks around grinning in the dark nearby, where a couple making noise in the dressing room suddenly falls silent. Eventually, he somehow manages to abduct and hide away, at some distance, in a far-fetched location, Seymour's kids. A harried store security guard appears from time to time but is useless. Periodically, the film cuts away to some looters breaking windows below, on the ground level. Seymour's husband, at home playing video games after the unsuccessful dinner meeting, gets concerned and jumps into the car. Absurdly, on his way to the mall, he crashes into some garbage cans, is accosted by some street punks, and takes off in someone else's car. He finally arrives at the mall and clumsily helps Seymour in an obligatory and uninteresting final fight scene and an implausible, panic search for and release of the endangered kids, moments before some machinery crushes them. Once outside, the family (and viewers) get the only explanation the movie has to offer, a couple of quick throwaway lines by the police about the psycho: "We found his mother's body. He just snapped. We'll probably never know why." That's it.

The movie's only good points are the performances by Seymour, natural as always and into her role as a decent, busy, trying-to-stay-involved mother, the beautiful actress playing her spirited daughter, and the pint-sized, deadpan, wiseguy son in their interactions together. Otherwise, the film is a complete waste of time.

The movie lightly sketches characters and subplots in ways that have little or nothing to do with the main story. The husband, played with bland lack of distinction by William Russ, is an uninteresting, ineffectual cliché. The psycho is so poorly drawn, his lines and actions so meaningless, that it seems as if there is nothing to him but a blur of aimless ham acting.

The story is paper-thin and the storytelling slow-paced, amateurish, and ineffective, with sketchy, stray, undeveloped elements never worked together into a dramatic whole. Not much changes even when it gets to the drawn-out hide-and-seek with the psycho in the blacked-out mall store. It is not easy to tell what is happening in the dark, and nothing much ever seems to happen. The movie throws in ill-defined and poorly dramatized surrounding events, such as the "looting," to no real effect. The cutaway shots throughout the movie to exaggerated scenes of busy-acting electric company workmen running around and shouting about the danger of an area-wide power failure -- apparently from nothing more than a run-of-the-mill thunder storm -- are forced, unbelievable, and feeble attempts to gin up suspense.

This movie should never have been made, much less released, in this form.

I missed the Amy Poehler-Tina Fey movie of some years ago, so I did not want to miss what promised to be another dream team of comedy talents in Date Night. Maybe the mixed reviews of both films should have warned me. Still, the idea of droll, down-to-earth comedians Steve Carrell and Tina Fey in an action-adventure farce seemed inspired. Well, they were likable and tried to bring some wit and energy to the movie. But the material let them and the audience down badly.

The movie began with some quick scenes at home and with friends meant to show how married life could come to feel boring and meaningless (friends suddenly announce their divorce and that they merely feel like "excellent roommates"). When accountant Carrell tries to break out of the mold with his real estate agent wife Fey on a night out of their New Jersey routines at a trendy Manhattan restaurant, the couple ends up taking another couple's reservation. The other couple is involved in blackmail and is being chased by thugs. Mistaking Carrell and Fey for the other couple, the thugs abduct them at gunpoint and chase them throughout the rest of the movie. Along the way, Carrell and Fey are caught up in loud car chases and quirky meetings and conversations with themselves and others, including big-name actors in cameos, such as a dim, shirtless, hunk security expert (Mark Wahlberg) and a mean mob boss (Ray Liotta). We learn that Fey does not "light up" for Carrell the way she does for the hunk because she is so tired taking care of everyone and everything else day in and day out and just wishes she had some time to herself (Fey has a nice line about wanting to enjoy a day that does not somehow depend on how someone else around her is doing). For his part, Carrell says he wants his wife to have more confidence in him and let him shoulder more home and family responsibilities. In a hasty, contrived, anticlimactic ending on a rooftop with everyone pointing guns at each other and the cliché of the police helicopter swooping in at the last minute, Carrell is made out to be the hero.

Parts of the dialogue and scenes with the divorcing friends (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, good in the roles) and with Carrell and Fey having a heart-to-heart talk had some originality, silly fun, and emotional truth to them. Fey sometimes shot out an unexpectedly earthy line that was funny, and Carrell had some funny moments trying to act and talk tough, as did the two of them making up stories mocking other diners in the restaurants with them. The blackmailing couple was humorously offbeat in the fairly short scene in which they appear.

But this was far too little to carry a movie, even one this short. In fact, the material would not even compress well into a good Saturday Night Live skit. The Out-of-Towners, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, is certainly not one of my favorite movies, but it is an insult to compare that fuller, livelier film to this one. The closest comparison to Date Night that I can think of in terms of my surprise and disappointment is Dana Carvey's disastrous 2002 film Master of Disguise.

Rarely have I seen a movie with as much on-camera talent turn out to be as skimpy and superficial as Date Night. The story was paper-thin. Never once did I laugh out loud. There were long stretches of dead time, filled with unfunny rambling (as when the couple are led in the park by thugs), with drawn-out and unoriginal cameos (especially by Liotta, who did not have a single funny line or action), and with noisy chase scenes (including a car chase that went on and on repetitively, endlessly trying to milk supposedly funny lines from a cab driver). Even the scene with Carrell and Fey on a stripper pole lost whatever novelty it had fast and came off as drawn-out and forced. The ending, in which Carrell supposedly proved himself to his wife, fell completely flat, without being the least bit clever, interesting, or believable. Much of the plot and gags felt recycled.

There were problems even with Fey and Carrell. Her flat detachment and his nerdy, gushing boyishness never came together to make them convincing as a seasoned working suburban couple or gave them much on-screen chemistry or rapport. The supporting characters of the thugs and police were weak, especially the all-knowing, glib policewoman who seemed on to the bad guys from the start, sapping any suspense. The bad guys, who included some corrupt cops and a sleazy political figure who hung out stoned in strip clubs while promising in public to clean up crime, are stock characters with nothing original or interesting about them. The same is true of the unfunny out-takes pasted onto the end credits, which, as another reviewer said, only suggest the cast had a lot more fun making the movie than the audience had watching it.

I wanted to like this movie as much as any of the breathlessly enthusiastic reviews on this site. But like other, better reviews, no matter how much I liked the stars and saw bits and pieces here and there to enjoy, there is no way to paper over how disappointing it was.

This film draws on an extreme true-life story that seems sure to make a person feel and think. In 1979, a rough, wild, pretty 19-year-old from a broken home leaves Philadelphia, where she works behind the counter at her father's Italian diner and hangs out in seedy nightclubs, for New York City. She becomes a phenomenal success almost overnight as an elite, new-wave, jet-set fashion model with "attitude." She parties on the wild side, has a close, on-again-off-again lesbian relationship with a makeup artist, suddenly loses her agent/mentor to cancer, and heavily abuses harder and harder drugs, frequenting "needle parks." Quickly, she burns out her body, relationships, and career. Reduced to trading sex for money, she is beaten up and raped. She is arrested for reckless driving and resisting arrest. She tries to make a career come-back and to go home. She sells jeans in a local shop. After repeated tries at rehabilitation, she either relapses or attempts a massive overdose. In seclusion in a hospital indigent ward, she dies in 1986 at 26 of the newly discovered AIDS.

Angelina Jolie gives a raw, emotional performance, combining child-like and hard qualities. The generally well-acted main supporting characters are thin (especially the idealized, "sweetness and light" Elizabeth Mitchell character), at times hammy (Mercedes Ruehl), but have some basic believability and traits that play into the drama (Faye Dunaway, Ruehl coddling and pushing; Ruehl and Mitchell withdrawing for various reasons; Eric Cole as a decent but dim hometown pal). There are glimmers of poignancy in some interactions and details of the experiences. Probably the most effective moments are the model's relationship with the makeup artist and destructive drug use. The movie conveys (partly by fictionalizing and tightly limiting its snapshots of her life) a sense of frenzy, loneliness, and emptiness -- life in a dead zone.

Yet, the movie is startlingly unsatisfying on any but the most basic emotional level of watching the vivid, photogenic Jolie act out the fateful events, with flashes of striking visuals in recreated settings and with perhaps the invitation to viewers to project onto the screen whatever trite, preconceived notions they might want to see about emotional problems, exploitation, or addiction. The film seems to lack any point of view. It narrates through sketchy, spotty vignettes rather than thoughtfully examines. The movie lacks detail, context, depth, substance, and insight, the characters and events little more than a blur. It barely scratches the surface of her "demons," how and why they came about, what was special about them, why they hit her so hard, and why drug abuse was her answer. (Regarding technique, scenes shift arbitrarily from color to black-and-white and back again, sometimes accented by heavy-handed music; they alternate with awkward, glib documentary-style "interviews"; and the long, distinctive chain-link-fence photo shoot and shower scenes, intended to be candid and uninhibited, are hampered by the stagey effort to avoid full frontal nudity, even in the extended, uncut version.)

Consistent with statements in the film that "No one knew Gia" (including her), its treatment of her background, emotional problems, promiscuity (among a flurry of quick, slick throwaway lines at the start we are told, but never shown, that she "slept around" but sex "was not the goal," "was not an issue"), overall relationships, lesbianism, drug addiction, and (strangely and especially) her modeling talent and career is vague, minimalist, and simplistic. Particularly weak or artificial are the statements mouthed by actors playing her contemporaries in the retrospectives; by the Italian photographer who spouts drivel as pious philosophy ("This is life...."); by the scornful, speechifying woman in the stilted, scripted rehab scene; and most disappointingly by the model herself and her "journal" (presented as poetic gems of meaning but falling far short of any such thing, even the message she wanted to send from her deathbed oddly off and easy, given her experiences: "she wanted to tell kids, you can handle it, you can handle anything that comes your way"). The movie does painfully little to delve beneath surface notions and manifestations and to illuminate any real understanding of this woman's situation, even less why she was a human being worthy of all of this special attention.

As a result, those reviews that claim to find profound meaning in this film are left to string together fuzzy, lofty-sounding clichés and platitudes ("tragic" "lost soul" or "free spirit" who "lived in the moment" and "followed her instincts"; "too beautiful to die, too wild to live"; "America's first supermodel") and to coast on the extreme, sensationalistic events of the model's life. Some make vast pretensions for the movie (that it itself does not make, much less deliver on), building up a heroine or martyr and sketching a morality play that blames everyone and everything else for what happened to her, while asking no hard questions about her own willful qualities and responsibility for her own behavior. The claims of deep meaning come across as shallow glorification of physical beauty, of tempestuousness, or of a glamorous, sensuous image for their own sake or as sheer sentimentality for a supposedly pathetic, helpless victim.

Ironically, all of the mindless emoting, adulation, even idolatry by those claiming to know, admire, or adore this woman through this essentially superficial movie -- just as surely as her supposed exploitation in her chosen career -- risks again reducing her, now in death, to a flat, one-dimensional, token figure being grabbed at by the masses (as fallen physical beauty, force of nature, glossy image, or victim). And if that does not diminish her, it may merely lavish undeserved attention and acclaim on a person of little or no substance (mired in what is presented as near-total confusion about who she was, what she wanted, and what she cared about, combined with non-stop destructive, thrill-seeking, instant-gratification behavior). The hollowness at the core of this film, of its subject, and of so much of this site's commentary about it is as troubling as the events depicted.

A stripper/porn actress/call girl (Catalina Larranaga) sets up a video camera for her session with a hit-man client (she is a free-spirit making a "documentary" about her life). The tape keeps running after his boss (a corrupt land developer) and a bald, stocky henchman arrive to discuss a job that night and she is kicked out of the hotel room. Later, the hit-man shows up dressed as a waiter at a dinner party for a do-gooder mayoral candidate, and fires in the candidate's direction but instead wounds the city council chairman.

Plump, stubble-faced cop Daniel Baldwin is cooling his heels outside the mansion, punished for having in the past mouthed off to the P.R.-obsessed mayor. To further establish him as a crude, irreverent he-man, Baldwin's character relieves himself on some bushes. Upon hearing the gunshots, he circles the house, notices an open kitchen window, and tries but fails to catch the shooter.

When the hit-man later remembers the camera (for some reason he let the hooker set it up), and tells his boss it is now gone, the boss's slinky hellcat henchwoman (Laurin Reina) shoots him dead. The boss visits the set of a sleazy movie being produced by fat slob "Slim," who sometimes used Larranaga in his films. She soon arrives, dropped off by her concerned roommate, Angie Everhart, a bartender with a checkered past. Claiming to be a film producer, the boss abducts and kills Larranaga.

Baldwin pointlessly gives Everhart a hard time in the police interrogation room. For no apparent reason, he completely changes to a softy when he takes her home. In some awkward scenes, the two become romantically involved, as she falls into danger from Reina and the stocky henchman, who are searching for the missing tape.

Along the way, Reina turns on her boss. She attempts to lure low-life Slim into helping her find the tape, only to have him threaten to tell her boss (who he is already blackmailing), so she blows Slim away.

Conveniently, a neighbor's question clues in Everhart that her dead roommate had taken her VCR to a repair shop with a tape stuck in it. Everhart recovers them. But just as she is watching the tape, Reina and the henchman loudly approach the house where she is staying, and, after a seemingly endless car and foot chase, abduct her (but not before she slips the tape to a bystander who passes it along to Baldwin). Baldwin has also learned that the real estate developer wants a highway built to a casino project in the desert and has made enormous campaign contributions to both the incumbent and the challenger.

In the film's climax, Baldwin gives the tape to Reina in exchange for Everhart, who has "made a deal" with Reina (but what about the stocky henchman?). They rush to the scene of a victory dinner for the mayoral challenger and foil a clumsy attempt on her life by the developer himself, with the henchman back in tow with him. It turns out that the city council chairman was in the developer's pocket and would become mayor when the mayor-elect died. Baldwin and Everhart merely shrug as Reina runs scot-free over to a CNN news crew to sell the tape.

Amazingly, the movie manages to be mildly enjoyable. The cast is a bunch of unknowns, and the title, acting, and story are lame. Baldwin is not cut out for the role of a rugged, romantic leading man. He seems to jump in and out of trying to play a character and mostly ends up acting as if he had been hauled in off the street to play himself. He comes across best as a messy, soft-spoken guy with some problems. His romance with Everhart is rushed and implausible. Her performance skates on the surface of a thin role. With a line-delivery that sometimes seems to miss a beat, she tries a little too hard to be serious and purposeful. But I was more impressed with her seriousness than with her plainer-than-expected looks. A feisty female detective is okay, but Willie Gault is a total dud as Baldwin's partner.

The other characters, including Baldwin's gruff chief, are bland or exaggerated cardboard cut-outs. The developer acts like a big-shot but never does anything smart. His murder plot is based on a skimmed-over, cliché motive and is confusing and sloppy (he arranges either to make or fake an attempt on the challenger's life before she has even won; it is unclear whether shooting the councilman was even intended, and, annoyingly, Larranaga's tape sounds garbled on this point). The plan serves only to put the police on notice that she is a target, and the payoff is simply and unbelievably luring her out of a dinner party alone with a cell phone call for him to pull the trigger on her himself. He seems clueless in the tape search and about Reina's scheming.

Reina is sexy and spirited enough to be fun to watch. But to suggest, as one review does, that simply because, without explanation, the movie lets her get away clean with known, multiple murders, kidnapping, assault, and robbery, that this is some sort of profound statement about life, rather than just flip, half-baked writing, is straining to find meaning in all the wrong places. Whether or not something "happens a lot in real life" does not, as the review assumes, automatically make it meaningful, interesting, entertaining, or credible when made the subject of a particular work of fiction.

Overall, there are enough threads to the story, and enough colorful caricatures on the make on the wild side, to hold some interest. Because of the involved plot, and because Baldwin, Everhart, and Larranaga make likable enough "good guys" to root for against the various "bad guys," the clumsy weaknesses can more easily be taken in stride as something fun to laugh at. This is an above-average, 4-star entry in a low-budget, formulaic, exploitation genre.

Even though it looked from the box like this movie was low-budget, with a cast of unknowns, I thought it might have some possibilities as a mystery story. I discuss the plot below but do not give away key details.

In this 1999/2000 movie, a down-on-her-luck-with-men career woman played by Andrea Roth works at an ill-defined sales firm or ad agency for an apparently kinky boss (Rae Dawn Chong). Chong invites her out to party at the raunchy nightclub "Pork." Roth has just broken up with a "needy" nerd boyfriend who keeps calling and following her. At Pork, Roth is attracted to but repulsed by a crass, slick-hair, leather-jacketed, cigarette-hanging-out-of-the-mouth "bad boy" (Linden Ashby).

Soon, Roth returns to the club alone and picks him up. In one of a number of confusing, poorly presented physical scenes over the course of the film, she lets him press against her and hang her over her apartment balcony railing. It is not clear whether this is meant to pass for wild sex or (as Roth seems to gossip to Chong) just elaborate, get-acquainted foreplay for a later session.

Meanwhile back at the office, Chong promotes Roth over two macho jerk co-workers (one of whom Roth is rumored to have dated). Roth comes over to their table at a restaurant, where they are crudely bad-mouthing her under their breath, to try to give them a pep talk. She meets a shy, orange-haired, big-glasses accountant from the firm, who the other two put up to asking her out. He later joins her for a polite dinner at her place.

As the increasingly sluggish movie drones on, Roth gets more involved with the bar punk but then tries to pull back when he grows so rough and possessive that it becomes abusive. The nerdy accountant, a shadowy brother, and the old boyfriend hover in the background. One of the macho jerks from the office ends up stabbed to death. The second soon meets the same fate. A scruffy, dogged young cop starts investigating, with the help of a tomboy waitress who wants more of his time.

Roth's old boyfriend is arrested when a knife turns up in his car, but he claims he had nothing to do with the killings. Chong drops by Roth's apartment to console her depressed friend, feebly comes on to her, is rebuffed, and is later accosted by the jealous, angry bar punk. Another victim turns up, this time strangled in an alley. In a long, labored, violent scene, the psycho killer is confronted in Roth's apartment.

The best that can be said about "Dangerous Attraction" is that slender, strawberry-blonde Roth looks pretty on screen, the cop and waitress are likable and make a cute couple, and there are a lot of suspects to confuse the issue for a while. Beyond that, the movie ends up being a frustrating failure.

Early on, the film uses some touches that seem to hint at depth and creativity (such as Roth's cryptic narration over a hazy bike-riding scene and Chong's odd behavior). It throws in some melodramatic frills toward the end.

But none of this can hide the fact that there is nothing special to the story, dialogue, cast, production values, or sets. The writing is far too thin to sustain the film, which becomes tedious, drawn-out, and overlong. By the time the movie grinds to a halt, with a final "shock effect" scene at a hospital (as much of a tacked-on gimmick as an earlier scene of a figure's silhouette in a wheelchair), you could not care less. The characters and acting are dull and flat, even in supposedly dramatic scenes (especially Ashby's annoying performance). No interesting color or detail is developed about the characters or the settings (their professions are mere window dressing). The detective work is almost non-existent. The film amounts to nothing more than an uninvolving, monotonous, surface-level effort that strings you along for what turn out to be cheap, shallow, trite, predictable, unsatisfying payoffs. The best description of the movie that I can think of is a thin crust of formula with no filling.

There are also amateurish mistakes, going to substance and style, that make the movie feel like even more of a waste of time. A character gratuitously gives Roth the address of that person's apartment, which leads to a key plot point, when there is no way in the world the person would have wanted Roth to drop by. Chong is poorly used in the film. She is relegated to a lifeless performance in a bit part, and is unflatteringly dressed and photographed, making an attractive woman look old and overweight. For some reason, the movie comes up with nothing but drab sweat-suits for Roth to wear in most scenes (including when she hosts the accountant for dinner). And the love scenes are ruined by sloppy, obvious cutaways to a body double for Roth who does not even have the same shape. This is insulting and unprofessional. The movie has no business using nudity if all it does is to make scenes look fake.

This busy crime movie is a pleasant surprise through most of its running time, but it suffers from some weaknesses in the characterizations, some loose ends, and a let-down ending. The next five paragraphs summarize the complicated story so that I may discuss it, but they withhold some key details to avoid spoiling the mystery.

Gregory Harrison plays a state's attorney with a Harvard business degree, the son of an influential but now-dead politician. Harrison is the favorite to replace a corporation's disgraced, insider stock trading CEO. He is opposed by an unctuous, ambitious company man who over the years has risen to the management ranks from the mail room and wants the top job for himself. Jose Ferrer is power-broker board member Killian, who may at one time have been Harrison's mentor. The company is eager to fix its image problem because it is trying to convince the rich head of another company, Mel Ferrer as Orlov, to agree to a merger. Orlov's young, third wife is played by Cybill Shepherd. She romanced Harrison ten years before but says she moved on because his career seemed more important to him that she did. Harrison's flippant, go-along-to-get-along underling and likely successor is Michael Gwynne, who at least advances the plot as a sounding board for Harrison.

Orlov, alone at home one night, is killed in an apparent burglary. Although Shepherd is a possible suspect, Harrison gingerly rekindles his relationship with her. A fence fingers a two-time loser "second story man" as claiming to have jewels from the Orlov heist, and the man is arrested on flimsy circumstantial evidence and railroaded toward indictment by the lazy Gwynne. Harrison, still his boss, feels the case is weak and wants to keep digging. Meanwhile, he takes a romantic tropical weekend vacation with Shepherd. It is interrupted when they recognize a man following them who has been hanging around back home as well. She thinks he is a private detective hired by her step-daughter, Adrienne Barbeau. Barbeau goes off the deep end about Orlov's estate going to Shepherd and claims Orlov confided that Shepherd had an affair with one of his business partners and that before he died he was writing a new will that would cut her out of any inheritance.

Harrison suggests that he and Shepherd keep their distance for a while, and continues investigating. He receives an envelope with photos of himself and Shepherd at the beach, which he shares with a blasé Killian, who says he also received copies but does not care as long as Harrison's indiscretion stays quiet. A stripper turns up who says she has been out of town but can give the second story man an alibi, and Harrison interviews Barbeau and finds her believable.

Harrison confronts Shepherd at an abandoned meat packing plant that is to be the site of a new office of the Orlov company. She now admits that a "heavy-set man" who said her husband "owed him some money" phoned her two days after the murder and threatened to harm her and others if she did not pay him $25,000. Speak of the devil, as they are leaving to report this to the police, they hear someone bearing down on them and try to hide. The thug finds them and is beating up Harrison, so Shepherd grabs a gun out of the thug's pocket and shoots him dead.

When the story hits the news, Killian disowns Harrison as a candidate for CEO. Later, Harrison is puzzled by a second, small-caliber gun that was found in the thug's pocket and by a check of his associates, which turns up a familiar face and a tie to Orlov. Falling into another ambush, Harrison out-runs a hale of bullets, until a convenient explosion wipes out the gunman, the first thug's partner. In a final scene, Harrison confronts the main criminal with hidden evidence of motive that he has found.

Overall, the movie handles the murder case and the business subplot with some intelligence and makes them interesting. But the two story lines are not always closely and meaningfully enough connected, and the movie can at times feel cluttered and overcomplicated, without a worthwhile payoff. There are loose ends. The movie never makes clear who shot and circulated the supposedly scandalous photos and why. Harrison's background and his relationship with Killian are glossed over. His bustling mother and Orlov's second wife and son make pointless, one-line appearances. The movie never bothers to explain how Gwynne could have risen to be Harrison's heir apparent when all he seems to have to offer is a wise-guy sneer and stupid, incompetent habit of jumping at the easiest, most obvious theory.

Although Harrison has some good lines and takes his big-shot role seriously, he does not seem to quite have the stature for the part. Shepherd comes across more as an energetic personality doing individual scenes than as a character. The movie never gives a glimpse into who she really is and ends on a weak note. The Ferrers and Barbeau are effective in their smaller parts.

Harrison's character is just thoughtful and restrained enough in how he handles the case and his relationship with Shepherd to avoid throwing credibility to the winds. But his clipped, controlled performance takes a toll on the movie in other ways. No real groundwork is laid for the relationship, it never comes alive with any convincing chemistry or passion, and it feels like a mere plot device. This makes events at the end of the movie, in particular, ring hollow.

The cast, characters, writing, and settings are good enough and there is enough credibly going on to hold my interest until the end. Unfortunately, there are some nagging problems, the ending descends into melodramatic action and unconvincing sentimentality, and the murder mystery turns out to be overly simplistic. In the end, despite the flaws, I think the movie is substantial enough to be worth seeing.

This movie is better than Sunset Grill, another marginal, grim, murky film in which Peter Weller plays a tough, honest loner taking on a powerful criminal conspiracy. But it may be less interesting than that strangely quirky, offbeat movie. Rainbow Drive is a thoroughly undistinguished dud, which is especially disappointing given its talented, recognizable cast and its origin in a Roderick Thorp novel.

Waking at dawn in the bed of a married woman (Kathryn Harrold), Weller, as the chief of detectives in Hollywood, hears strange sounds coming from the house next door. He discovers five dead bodies, neatly killed in their beds, sees a man running away, and fruitlessly gives chase to a fleeing car. By the time he returns to the crime scene, the "big city" cops - represented by a blowhard chief running for mayor and his ice-cold lackey assistant (David Caruso) - have already moved in on the case and frozen out Weller's local office. A woman's body mysteriously disappears from the house and shows up in another location, the four remaining, male bodies in the house are quickly written off as victims of a drug-related gang crime, and Weller's partner (Bruce Weitz) soon dies in a car crash after having tried to warn Weller off the case.

Seething with suspicions about his partner's death and what appears to be a big-scale cover-up, Weller digs into the case. But he is hampered by warnings from higher-ups to keep away and by not being able to divulge that he had discovered the five bodies at the house because that would also mean revealing that he had been with the married woman next door. He is fed clues by a lovely, intelligent woman (Sela Ward) who tells him she is a psychiatrist "profiling" the mass killing. Despite the lock-down on access to the case, she seems to have free run of the crime scene and the case files. Weller enlists the reluctant help of a sympathetic but cowardly coroner and of a fidgety but dutiful cop, who provides various wiretapping and other gadgets (like a "pen gun"). Along the way, Weller leaves unanswered phone messages for Harrold, takes a late-night swim in the pool at his house (how did he afford that?), shares a kiss and a hug on the couch with Ward, finds his house is bugged, and survives a clumsy attempt on his life.

The trail leads to a sleazy nightclub. It turns out to be a money laundering "front" for unidentified corrupt activities of a high-society big-shot, who is so evil as to have "butchered" the people in the house, including an intimate, for attempting blackmail. Weller tracks down and beats the truth out of a punk who sold out the others in the house but apparently has managed to stay alive by hiding evidence as "insurance" (that conveniently only Weller gets him to admit and then finds). An FBI agent surfaces, claims to be conducting a long-term investigation, and tries to warn Weller off. But he slugs the agent and bulls ahead alone into a final confrontation and gun battle. It leaves a pile of dead bodies, except for the big-shot, who slips away. After the FBI bursts on the scene, declares Weller's use of a wire "illegal," and berates him for blowing the chance to nail the top person, Weller shakes his head and walks away, with the cynical exit line, "The important ones never get caught." The credits roll.

This movie is more serious and less uneven than Sunset Grill, which came off as weirdly tongue-in-cheek. Weller looks quite different than he did there, here as a clean-cut, suit-and-tie chief. Again, he does an adequate, straight-ahead job. Popular supporting actors are on hand, like Caruso, Ward, Weitz, Harrold, and Megan Mullally.

But the talent is wasted in a weak, flat, unoriginal effort at a "gritty crime thriller." The story is choppy, trite, and undeveloped. Weller's "investigation" is flimsy and confusing, and his tactics are unprofessional and self-defeating. The movie lacks wit or feeling. For a movie set in "Hollywood," the film offers nothing more than dirty, dingy shots that seem like they could have come from many other places. The music by Tangerine Dream is barely noticeable and completely unmemorable.

None of the characters is interesting or engaging, and it is hard to follow who they all are. Weller's brooding, opaque character soon becomes tiresome. Caruso and Ward do good jobs, but they have only thin, limited roles. Harrold is a glorified extra, given nothing more to do than look pretty, fill out a nightgown, and banter with Weller in one trivial scene. Mullally fares only slightly better in the bit part of (I think) a loudmouth friend of the murdered woman. (I did not even see the cute blonde on the box cover in the movie.) Here, Weitz wears loud, checkered sport coats, chews with his mouth open, and by all appearances is a spineless, good-for-nothing smart-aleck whose only contributions are to keep repeating that "Rainbow Drive is not our case" and to suddenly blurt out that he sold out his badge years ago by letting a VIP hit-and-run driver go before other cops arrived. Yet we are supposed to care about this nothing, amateurishly drawn character, who the movie belatedly and implausibly tries to turn into a hero by saying he "knew something" and was "tracking down a lead" when he died.

TV Guide billed this movie as a "whodunit." It is more like a "who-didn't-dun-it" and a "why'd-they-bother-to-make-it." Everything in the movie, including the tone, look, feel, settings, and characters, exists only to conjure up a superficial effect -- a cynical, bad attitude and image of a cesspool of corruption. All that is accomplished in the end is an uninspired, shallow, murky, disorganized, depressing, pointless police procedural that is not meaningful or satisfying but instead merely goes through the motions.

This movie has some promising elements. There is a premeditated murder plot with some intricacy, twists, and atmosphere. Kim Basinger is good playing a beautiful mystery woman with a troubled past and an exotic, violent illness ("pathological intoxication"). She conveys soft, placid (if overly simple) beauty one minute and psychotic rage the next, rivaling Catherine Zeta-Jones' in "Traffic" in her ability to turn memorably driven, tough, and hard-hearted on a dime.

Uma Thurman looks and acts her slight part adequately enough as Basinger's delicate, spaced-out sister, a patient of Richard Gere. Paul Guilfoyle hams it up as a boorish criminal defense lawyer pal of Gere's. A police detective is tough, crude, and menacing, on cue (barking at Gere, "Don't yank my dick").

But the film collapses under the weight of its many flaws. Gere is completely unconvincing as an "eminent psychiatrist." This has less to do with how he looks than how the movie presents him. He never says or does anything to credibly establish such a character. His attempts seem limited to occasionally speaking in jargon or hushed tones. He appears gullible and ignorant, as when it takes someone else's lecture to tip him off by chance to a colorful passage in Freud's work that is key to the criminal's scheme; even one of the plotters had expected Gere to be familiar with it. His supposedly joking answer to Basinger that as a psychiatrist he simply repeats, as a question, whichever last two words his patient speaks -- "'Your mother?'" -- hits a little too close to home. It is a truer description of how Gere comes across here than he thinks. Nor does the film give any background that might help explain the personal vulnerability that makes him such a dupe. The character is little more than a dim, steady facial expression and a resume.

Thurman's character amounts to no more than a stagey plot gimmick. She never comes alive as a real person with a real relationship to anyone. The prosecutor is played with gruff style and no substance by Harris Yulin. He is given so little to say and do, and the character accomplishes so little, if anything, that I could not even find him listed in the credits.

Even worse is the Eric Roberts character, Basinger's intense husband with mob ties. It is a tired, superficial, trying caricature that drags the movie down to the level of countless low-budget, rip-off "romantic thrillers." The unoriginal character and portrayal recall cinematic gems like "Play Murder for Me" and "Dead On" (both with Tracy Scoggins), "Tryst" (with Barbara Carrera), and probably dozens of other "abusive husband" exploitation flicks and TV show episodes (ala "Silk Stalkings").

The weaknesses in the characters are only compounded by the weaknesses in the story. The plot flaws become so damaging and distracting that they sap entertainment value right out of the film. Watching the movie becomes like trying to drive a stick-shift down a road full of sink-holes (the film does feature a "ditch"). The abrupt, midstream shift in tone and pacing does not help.

No explanation is ever offered for how the killer was able, in real time, to "hide" the murder weapon from the police - don't they search a crime scene? don't they have search warrants for other hiding places? And this is a plot point that drives most of the movie.

We are supposed to believe that the prosecutor would proceed with a first degree murder trial not only without a murder weapon but without establishing the accused's motive, not even bothering to investigate until afterward exactly who was in line to receive a $4 million payout.

We are supposed to believe that Gere can install himself on the psychiatric board responsible for evaluating the fitness for release from an institution of his own, indefinitely confined lover.

We are supposed to believe -- and cheer -- that two outside professionals would arrive for an interview without introducing themselves or their reason for being there, and that another character would suddenly switch a lifelong allegiance, all so that Gere can stage an elaborate trick on someone he later acknowledges is mentally ill from childhood abuse, only apparently to arrange an even more haphazard, convoluted, and contrived manipulation later by behaving cavalierly and roughly to a patient.

We are supposed to believe that murderers can walk out of mental institutions simply by switching clothes with someone else in a bathroom.

We are supposed to believe that Gere would enlist a psychiatric patient to steal for him, without giving any warnings or taking any precautions to protect the young man from the vicious homicidal maniac with whom this puts him at odds (to compensate for this colossal error, the movie prematurely discloses the man's fate, creating a witness and another potential crime to prosecute and thus undercutting the suspense of whether the killer of the earlier victim will escape unpunished).

We are supposed to believe, for the sake of a quick, shock-effect touch at the end, that, after two court trials had thoroughly publicized the events of the case, a character at its heart would appear to be recycling the exact same modus operandi for future use. And so on.

The movie suffers badly under the relentless battering of these accumulated character and plot problems. Simply dismissing them with an air of glib pseudo-sophistication, all-knowing cynicism, empty flippancy, or lazy, unintelligent flicking of the "not helpful" button on any review honest enough to point them out is not a serious response. Nor do they simply disappear because the movie inserts some attractive visuals, such as of bridges and lighthouses, or ramps up dramatic music (somewhat frantically and mechanically, starting about halfway through). Any meaningful review has to come to terms not only with the elements of the movie that are promising and likable but with the substantial flaws that prevent it from being satisfying.

The "hero" of this crime movie is a foul-mouthed, beat-up, cigarette-always-hanging-out-of-the-mouth, booze-guzzling, bug-eating, cop-turned-low-life-P.I., played by Peter Weller. The character is supposedly redeemed by his basic honesty, feelings toward his wife, and rapport with the down-and-out.

Weller's character is estranged from his wife, played by Alexandra Paul in a couple of brief and shallow scenes. This is in part because as a cop he unwittingly set up a sting on her father concerning a savings-and-loan fraud, which appears to have led the man to hang himself. The wife owns a seedy-neighborhood Southern California bar and grill, which has some employees from south of the border.

The movie begins with a confusing and violent scene in Mexico, in which one man is shot in the head and the face of another (an employee of the bar and grill, I think) is crushed by hand by a tall, burly blonde henchman. When the thugs come looking for a letter that the employee might have sent back to the grill, Weller's wife meets the same fate.

At the bottom of it all is what turns out to be some weird organ harvesting scheme using illegal Mexican immigrants. Just about everyone in the movie seems to have been involved somehow in this ill-defined, gruesome plot. This includes: Stacy Keach, hamming it up as drawling rich guy Shelgrove, who lives in a mansion, owns a firing range that seems to double as a bar, and gives lengthy expositions on Mayan culture; Lori Singer, as the stereotypical breathy-voiced, brooding blonde knockout, at one moment politely business-like, at another a steamy seductress, and at the next cool-and-hard-as-nails, who apparently manages Shelgrove's shooting range and has sometime in the past been an organ recipient (though nothing about this character, or her relationship to anyone else, is made clear); John Rhys Davies as a wholly corrupt, abusive INS agent; a sweaty, neurotic surgeon; Weller's utterly ineffectual cop pal who courted his wife; and even Weller's deceased father-in-law, who took an interest in Mexican immigrants.

There is some mystery and detection, the cast includes some recognizable names, and Weller and Keach are passable. But no one is displayed to good effect. The characters, story, and settings are thin, murky, ugly, and uninvolving. As it unfolds, the story is choppy and obscure, not crisp and dramatic. Despite the grim subject matter, the movie has an incongruous tongue-in-cheek feel, for example, in how in how it presents Weller, Rhys Davis, Shelgrove, and the doctor.

Weller's uncanny ability, while mumbling and shambling along, to keep going through all the smoke, booze, bruises, bullets, complications, and adversaries to get to the bottom of it all is increasingly implausible. A prime example is the scene in which Weller, wounded, drugged senseless, and lying on the doctor's operating table (and why would the bad guys go through this trouble instead of just shooting or strangling him, as they do to everyone else?), pulls himself up, stumbles away, and fights the blonde muscle man to the death.

The movie's way of resolving everything is to kill off characters (good and bad) in one brutal manner or another, including, most wastefully, a female INS agent. Its overall ugliness seems to be done for cheap shock-effect rather than to convey any larger meaning, its style a substitute for telling a clear, full, and effective story. Some gratuitous nudity and tasteless "comic relief," thrown in for good measure, do not help.

Other reviews have rightly pegged Weller's character as a "stumblebum with a BB gun" and the movie as a "muddled tale of slobs and sex." This is a quirky but unpleasant, confusing, poorly developed, and unsatisfying movie.

The movie opens with James Brolin as a grieving widower and an architect whose firm has been taken over by a wealthy businessman, with the help of a big-shot lawyer. Brolin's character, who has largely kept to himself after his wife's death, reluctantly goes out for drinks with colleagues from work, including a homely, matronly, long-time female associate of his at the firm. At the bar, Brolin is accosted by a beautiful blonde young woman who says a fraternity-looking punk has been bothering her. She rushes Brolin into an embrace, then hurries him out through the kitchen and to a car in the alley, where she seduces him. She phones him at work the next day, and they meet for dinner. Afterward, they drive to a large, fancy house.

Brolin wakes up in the middle of the night to find the young woman gone. Wandering around the house, he discovers the body of the wealthy businessman, stabbed in the back in an upstairs bedroom. He rushes to his associate's home, where she lives with her mother. He decides to contact hard-as-nails defense attorney Meg Foster and turn himself in.

At the ensuing trial, all evidence points to Brolin. The young blonde cannot be traced, and the businessman's blonde wife testifies that it was she herself who had the affair with Brolin. No one has seen them together. But her story is backed up by hotel records showing a reservation in her name that happened to have been next to a room in which Brolin stayed on a recent business trip. Brolin's fingerprints are at the scene of the crime, and his DNA is found in what turns out to have been the wife's car. There is talk that the businessman intended to replace or demote Brolin at the firm.

While being transported back to prison from court one day, Brolin sees a bus billboard with the young woman's picture on it. He tells his lawyer, but she is ready to throw up her hands with the case and advises him to plead guilty to manslaughter and take five years in jail.

Frustrated, Brolin manages to fool the guards into thinking he has been released on bail. Once free, he sets out for the advertising/modeling agency that he learns from a quick phone call was responsible for the billboard. He identifies the blonde woman's picture in a file, with her name and address written on the back. At her apartment, she confesses that she is a part-time model and escort who agreed to set up Brolin. She shows him a photograph she was given of him and his wife, with a third person's face torn off. They arrange to meet the next day, by which time the blonde says she can find out who hired her.

Brolin's lawyer, against her better judgment, agrees to let him sleep on the couch at her place that night. There is a silly scene where Brolin's character acts like a high school kid with a crush, as he looks longingly through frosted glass at Foster supposedly taking her clothes off in the next room, before shaking off the reverie and settling in on the couch. (The only nudity in the film is in the earlier, brief scene when Brolin and the young blonde spend time together at what turns out to be the businessman's house.) From there, the movie heads into its conclusion with a series of thin, hasty, choppy scenes. The next day, things go badly. Brolin ends up at his old office at night asking for help from his associate. When he finds the other half of the torn photograph, the pieces begin to come together on how and why he was set up. It was a conspiracy that included someone close to him who was supposedly duped into helping. Even though the frame was air-tight, the person claims, unbelievably, "I didn't know it would go this far, they said you would never be convicted." The movie ends with fist-fights and shootings, as Brolin confronts the culprits.

The movie can best be described as lightweight and lackluster. The characters, dialogue, and situations are not particularly clever, original, interesting, or believable. They simply keep the story moving in a linear, surface-level manner.

Brolin, acting earnest, befuddled, and wronged, and Foster, acting aloof, frosty, and tough, are adequate in thin, undeveloped roles. The rest of the cast is completely forgettable, playing non-descript or cardboard characters with little screen time. This is especially true of the drippy D.A. The movie's portrayal of a prosecutor (usually a meaty role) is the least impressive that I can recall of any courtroom drama.

The rushed, put-up scene where Brolin meets the blonde at the bar and within minutes is having sex with her in a car is implausible, as is his escape from prison. Also disappointing are the scenes, which only undercut the characters, where Foster unprofessionally gives up on Brolin in the middle of the trial, even as he has found a critical clue that she and her detectives themselves should have found and should be following up on, and then after his prison break equally suddenly and for no reason becomes convinced of his innocence. Brolin's unraveling of the solution to the murder, like the plot itself, appears hasty and superficial, dependent on a gift clue falling into his lap by accident.

With the elaborate frame-up, the movie looked like it might have some ingredients of an interesting murder mystery. At times, the cast and story were mildly entertaining. But it quickly became clear that the characters and story had only been developed in the most shallow of ways. In the end, the movie had too little substance to be satisfying.

This was undoubtedly one of the worst movies I have ever seen. To see talented, intelligent actors like Ron Silver, Rebecca DeMornay, and Mariska Hargitay caught up in it was all the more appalling. The best that can possibly be said about the film is that DeMornay looks beautiful on screen. I cannot discuss how dismally bad a movie this is without summarizing what happens. I try to stick the main story line, without giving away certain details.

The movie begins with a "happy scene" of husband and wife Doug and Lynn Kaines (Silver, DeMornay) wrapping up a Mexican vacation, preparatory to moving their specialty furniture-making business south of the border. They head home to the U.S., driving to the border at night on a lonely, isolated road. Disaster strikes when a man staggers out of the fog in front of their car. The man bounces off of the windshield and into a ditch. After checking to see that he looks dead, with his "brains coming out of his head," the couple drives off.

There follows nothing more than a steady stream of cliché, melodramatic, and extreme ways to torment these two people. It is all done for cheap effect, without any larger purpose or meaning. It is unpleasantness for unpleasantness sake. Plot details about the killing in Mexico, which are injected at various points, seem almost beside the point.

First, there is a trumped-up scene at the border where guards become hostile and then just walk away. Next, the couple bickers, has stagey, protracted nightmares or daydreams, and generally wallows in guilt about the hit-and-run. For example, a scene with the couple behind the wheel while their vehicle goes through a car wash drags on endlessly, capped by the ugly image of a somehow still-bloody eyebrow becoming dislodged from the windshield wiper.

Then, mysterious hulking stranger Jake Shell (Rutger Hauer) arrives. He has vacant expressions and vague, clumsy speech that are supposed to be sinister but quickly become a mannered, exaggerated, annoying, and time-wasting gimmick. Shell aggressively tries to insinuate himself into their home and business by dropping hints, over and over again, that he has come up from Mexico and knows about the accident.

The couple makes tedious, pointless attempts to drive him away, such as a wasted scene with a lawyer, or to keep him close at hand. Apparently for the sheer sake of it, Shell escalates his activities to whatever sick, vicious, sadistic behavior the writers can think of next to throw in with the kitchen sink. When the couple's showroom employee Hargitay, acting like a ditzy moron, goes with Shell to his apartment on a date, he brutalizes her during exaggerated "kinky" sex, causing her to quit. Shell makes hammy, "weird" advances toward DeMornay, including surprising her in the sauna. Her pregnant character loses her baby. Silver is beaten up. In a particularly degrading scene, Shell helps himself to a videotape of the couple making love and then taunts them about it.

"Happy music" returns when it looks like Shell has accepted money to leave. Not for long. More advances, abuse, and beatings. Shell invades the Kaines' home, with a floosie in tow, trashes the house, shorts out the wiring on the sauna trying to raise the temperature to boiling hot, and forces the Kaines to listen all night to his raucous sex.

The last 15 minutes degenerates into nothing but a continuous brawl and shoot-out. Shell becomes a Frankenstein monster that nothing can stop -- not punches, not objects broken over his head, not a fall from a second-story window, not a wound to the chest, not being immolated by flames, almost not by electrocution.

In one of the worst scenes I have ever seen in any movie, Shell takes a break from the intimidation and fighting to leave the house momentarily to go to his camper-truck. He returns to the house, framed in the front doorway, lit from the back with what looks like fog all around him, dressed like a cowboy with two six-shooters, the camera often zooming in on his eye next to a bloody gash on his head. Silver and DeMornay have to stand there for humiliating reaction shots. Shell proceeds to fire all around the couple, shattering lamps and windows and setting the house ablaze. When Shell himself is consumed by flames, he goes flailing out to the sauna and dives in. This creates a chance for some final embarrassing lines from DeMornay to Shell, with Silver lying wounded nearby: "You want this?" she says, tearing off one of several layers of clothes, "You afraid of me?" Shell resumes shrieking and firing bullets, even while going into wild convulsions when the couple team up to clumsily and obviously toss an electric lamp into the sauna. Sirens blare in the background (where were the neighbors through all of this?). With the house burning down, the movie fades to the credits, as if to say all the movie leaves behind is a heap of ashes.

All of the torment, violence, and sexual content is exploited for nothing more than empty, mindless, voyeuristic shock value. The movie is not even true to its convictions in exploiting the sexual content, which makes it lame and incompetent on that level, too. There are numerous scenes with heavy-handed sexual overtones, but the only nudity (even in the so-called "Unrated" version) is a brief topless shot of the least-known actress, Tara Clatterbuck, in a frivolous scene. Nor is the movie original. It is a cheap formula rip-off of films like Cape Fear.

This movie was a tedious, trying, insulting, offensive disaster. That some reviews try to pretend otherwise is a pathetic example of just how low standards have sunk. When the only problem an otherwise breathlessly enthusiastic review sees in a movie like this is that a character calls the couple's Ford Explorer a "jeep," something is terribly wrong.

The background to this movie is that a police detective had allowed himself to get romantically involved with a suspect, with murderous consequences. This caused the detective to go into a tailspin and become a rowdy troublemaker. As the movie begins, he is taken off active duty after a drunken bar fight and required to report to a police psychiatrist. While cooling his heels in his low-rent apartment, he notices through the uncovered window of an apartment across the street a pretty, meek-seeming woman (Jennifer Rubin) in various seductive poses. He also sees her husband enter the apartment and apparently beat her up. He later meets the woman, who went into business with her husband and does design sketches. The cop is attracted to her, and tries to find out what is going on with the husband and warn him off. The cop begins a relationship with the woman.

As tensions mount, one day the cop sees from his window the husband burst into the couple's apartment waving a gun. The cop runs across the street and shoots the husband. The cop's bland, crude older partner is assigned to the case and starts turning up suspicious facts about the shooting. For example, the partner knows about the cop's confrontation with the husband in the days before the shooting and suspects that the cop is having an affair with the woman. It turns out that the husband's gun was broken and could not fire. And someone using the wife's name bought the gun from a street punk. The cop, now heavily involved with the woman, does his own investigating. Meanwhile, an unpleasant, coarse, trash-talking, leather-jacket-wearing, cigarette-smoking female reporter (Mariel Hemingway) keeps following him around, giving and asking for information about the case and peppering him with heavy sexual innuendo.

Two gift clues (a signed design sketch and an overseen piece of mail, which tie certain characters together) lead to the truth, while the cop himself becomes a target. The conclusion comes in badly explained, trumped-up, drawn-out, exaggerated seduction and confrontation scenes at a sleazy bar and motel. After a shootout, a character simply walks out of the motel, past the arriving police cars, and the credits roll. No attempt is made to give the events meaning.

The plot and characters are paper thin, ill-defined, and uninvolving. The story is predictable and slow-paced. The motive for what happens and the hidden relationship between two of the characters are poorly explained. And, as with everything in the movie, they are layered over with heavy-handed sexual content (which goes so far as to show brief glimpses of Rubin topless and to put Hemingway, clothes on, in a version of a lap dance) in the place of meaningful, entertaining storytelling. The unknown actor playing the cop brings nothing memorable to the role, except his long hair. The best that can be said is there is at least some attempt at a mystery plot, Rubin is demure and pretty playing her ineffectual character, and Hemingway, who annoyingly chews up the scenery in every scene she is in, has a couple of sexy moments.

With Rear Window back in the news following the release of the new movie Disturbia, and with Courtney Cox (Friends) and Paul Guilfoyle (CSI) in the cast (albeit in bit parts), maybe the 1990 TV movie Curiosity Kills will come to someone's attention. The actors -- C. Thomas Howell, Rae Dawn Chong, Jeff Fahey, Cox, and Guilfoyle -- are likable. There is some slight definition to their characters and setting (least so with Fahey's character, who turns on a dime from ditzy to maniacal). The main problem is the film's amateurish, thin, far-fetched story and story-telling. It has all the elements of a bad, low-budget cable TV "thriller." Despite how it is marketed, it is silly to say this movie has anything in common with Rear Window. Although I try not to give away plots in reviews, this one is so simplistic and obvious that it makes it hard. So be forewarned.

The movie opens with a violent scene (with cheap, unconvincing special effects) in which all of the police guards of a drug informant are shot to death, only to have the informant himself kill the hit-man. The scene then shifts to a run-down, warehouse-looking apartment building in a bad neighborhood in which Howell, a starving-artist photographer, works as the janitor for sleazy, quick-buck absentee landlord Guilfoyle, who appears briefly in the movie, wearing a leather jacket and driving a motorcycle. Howell's neighbor, Chong, is a starving-artist sculptor. Although the film never explains it, he has a girlfriend (Cox) who is a successful model and wants him to switch to commercial photography and move with her to a fancy condo in Malibu. The very next day after an old, failed, drunk painter who is another friend and neighbor of Howell's is found dead in his apartment in a tub full of blood, a vacuous-looking "actor" (Fahey) arrives to take the place.

From then on, Howell, who already doubts the old artist's "suicide," picks up tidbits that supposedly make him suspicious of the actor, enlists Chong in spying on him, and blows off Cox's efforts to get him to look at the condo and go to parties with her plastic friends. From time to time, a few lines from a TV news program can be heard playing in the background at Howell's apartment, reporting that the informant has been moved to a new safehouse and that the drug kingpin's trial is fast approaching. This obvious gimmick passes for subtlety in the film.

The movie takes a very long time to reach completely predictable, anticlimactic conclusions -- both the main crime plot and the romantic subplot. And it has nothing interesting to say along the way. Rather than suspenseful, the film can be best described as trying and annoying. By the time it gets to the sinister tag-lines, "Cat, that's a funny name. How many lives do you have?" and "Didn't anybody ever tell you, curiosity kills?", it has long been clear that the threadbare movie has nothing interesting or dramatic to offer.

The movie also depends on ludicrous plot gimmicks. For example, the "actor" leaves the audio feed from a bug he has somehow planted in the new "safe-house" apartment across the street blaring in his own apartment while he is away, which, of course, Howell and Chong overhear (and at first misunderstand, further dragging out the proceedings). We are supposed to believe that a 911 call will be directly routed to a corrupt cop. On top of that, somehow the non-stop hacking cough that the bad cop has in every conversation with the hit man and that is overheard by Howell is absent throughout his entire early conversations with Howell. We are also supposed to believe that even after a massacre of its own men who were protecting the informant and his survival by sheer luck, the police would move the informant to a new building without checking out the residents of a building with a direct line of fire into the informant's apartment. And the police would let the informant sit in plain view in front of an uncovered window. And they would be fooled into opening the door by a sloppy impersonation.

After unprevented carnage all around, we are supposed to find a conclusion satisfying in which Howell and Chong sit together in the sunshine on a couch on the edge of the roof. They exchange a few light lines about "That was quite an adventure we had," "Well, we did the best we could," "I can't leave this building," "Or your neighbor," and end up kissing. The only redeeming feature of the film is that Howell and Chong, playing their earnest young characters, are pleasant to watch, and, believe it or not, the ending is actually kind of sweet. But otherwise the movie is a flimsy, boring, amateurish waste of time.

This movie is imaginative and touches on some interesting ideas. The film creates a picture of how much power and trust a government can have when there is a terrorist threat and what might happen if a well-connected, corrupt organization exploited them to frame an innocent person for a crime it commits. The brave, serious-minded, determined hero faces the impossible situation of having not only the criminals but the entire weight of law enforcement and the public against him. With some grit and technical skill, the movie shows interesting, smart, tough, resourceful ways in which he might try to survive and strike back, despite the staggering odds.

At the same time, the very imaginativeness of the movie made it hard to take seriously. This is why I was not bothered by the political cheap-shots others saw in the film. Consider the context. This is an action movie that fails to develop any serious themes, and if it is even trying to, it fumbles them so incompetently it discredits itself. And it is a shame if the film betrayed the book, but I was not offended because I did not even know there was a book.

But, purely on the level of entertainment value, stacking the odds so high against the hero, which creates the interesting set-up, also makes it very hard to explain how such a thing could have happened and how the hero could overcome it. It also raises expectations that the movie cannot or does not deliver on for how it will all be resolved. So the movie presents an interesting, well-executed set-up but lacks the depth or development to the characters and story to pull it off in the end.

The criminal organization -- superficially represented by a few colorful, stock characters -- is horribly ill-defined, as is any government role in it. The sometimes sinister-seeming actions or dialogue of FBI higher-ups and the frequent placement of the criminal masterminds in what look like government settings create the misleading impression that the villains are actually part of the FBI or another agency. If the movie is trying to imply that the criminals and the government are one and the same, then that is nothing more than a cheap gimmick because no attempt is made to credibly explain how they could be working together (a lone, grandiosely corrupt U.S. Senator from a relatively uninfluential wilderness state and an ex-Colonel are the only links?). The more details that are given, the more implausible the story becomes. The increasingly ineffective way the criminals behave during the movie takes a toll on the credibility of them having planned so masterful an initial crime.

As a result of unexplained motivations and unlikely events, an FBI agent ends up teaming with the hero. But the agent is played as a confusing, unlikeable drudge, right from his very first annoying moments on screen. At times, he acts like an eagle-eye, encyclopedic-brain professional, at others like a dunce. Which is it? How does the hero possibly have the time to whip him into shape as a reliable, lean, mean fighting machine?

The hero's ability to find out information and obtain resources while on the run are unbelievable. How, for example, does he know just when to show up in a boat with a high-powered rifle to foil an elaborate attempt to stage the suicide of the FBI agent (who has been investigating on his own and been abducted and beaten senseless by thugs)? The villains are careless in figuring out late the identity of the hero's other, first accomplice. The movie tries to explain this, and it could be excused as making the point that even the most technologically savvy, well-planned operations can still fall victim to simple human error. But less excusable is the failure of the hero (whose mind otherwise seems to work like a steel trap) to realize that his accomplice (who simply returns home after helping him) is in great danger. So at the expense of the hero's character, and of victimizing the accomplice, the movie has the hero do something stupid simply because they need it as a plot gimmick. Despite some attention to detail, the three supposedly climactic end scenes, including a stunt with a rifle to show his innocence in front of no less than the U.S. Attorney General himself, the destruction of critical, hard-won evidence for no good reason, and a crude, unimaginative final shootout scene, are a mess -- choppy, slow-paced, unexplained, implausible, contrived, and falling far short of a meaningful, dramatic resolution.

The supporting cast includes actors such as Danny Glover, Ned Beatty, and Michael Sandor, who at least bring some zest to undeveloped material. But Mark Wahlberg is weak as the lead. His portrayal is flat and inarticulate, never more so than with the supposedly pivotal line, "They killed my dog." His line about working for but hating the government is supposed to be meaningful but comes across as mere smart-aleck cynicism. He acts grim and close-mouthed but not passionately intense. He is serious but not charismatic. He lacks the confident authority, command, and seasoning that Steven Seagal brought to the Under Siege films. The actor playing Wahlberg's FBI partner seems as unimpressive and out-of-his-depth as his character.

So, while the movie has some interesting and entertaining elements, the characters and story skate by too much on the surface and come to too clumsy a conclusion to be satisfying.