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| DIRECTED BY |
| Peter Medak |
| STARRING |
| Gary Oldman |
| Lena Olin |
| Annabella Sciorra |
| Juliette Lewis |
| Roy Scheider |
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Warning: Spoiler in Second Paragraph
Jack Grimaldi is a greedy, deceptive, and generally abominable lothario of a corrupt cop who also happens to have a compassionate side that he shows when he expresses his grief over getting two fellow officers killed after he reveals the location of a safeguarded mobster to Don Falcone (Scheider.) The film may have even been great if it stayed on a convincing wavelength instead of falling into a pit of needless plot complexities and exaggerations.
The events try to get so wittily complex and intertwined that they transcend plausibility because one sharp turn too many has been taken. I understand that this is a film noir (to some degree, anyway) but many events are just too shady � so much that they don�t make much sense. Whatever happened to that subplot with Sal and Mona, anyway? What was going on there? And here�s a question for the screenwriter: why would Mona go through all of the trouble of amputating her own arm in order to make Don think that she�s dead if she�s just going to go ahead and abduct and murder him anyway? I�d also like to know how a guy gets to not go to jail after selling out his police force and murdering someone in public.
Medak�s direction is stylized in a fairly calm and downbeat way, but � just like the traditional film noir � it has its kinetic moments. The whole car sequence involving Jack retrieving his second half of the money from Mona is absolutely excellent and there are other moments of commendable visual flair.
Lena Olin is seductively creepy and � thanks to her raspy voice � sometimes even androgynous as the femme fatale, although her character�s actions are commonly far too overblown. Although I think using the protagonist�s conflicting �inner mind� as well as his everyday thoughts for narration isn�t a bad idea, the voiceovers are overused and try a little too hard to be poetic at times. And it�s unfortunate that the film ends up weighing so much importance down onto the relationship between Jack and Natalie because his love for her is never really that convincing anyway. All in all, film noirs are much better when plot developments are intrinsically convincing and characterizations aren�t so overwrought.
