Purple death from outer space (12/7/95)
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“He's a cop on the edge. She's a woman with a dangerous secret. And now they're both...”
Fair Game. [Andrew Sipes, 1995. Written by Charlie Fletcher; after a novel by Paula Gosling.]
Joel Silver does it again: Type A legal eagle Cindy Crawford is jogging down the beach one sunny afternoon when abruptly somebody [surely it couldn’t be a critic] starts shooting at her, which gets her hauled off to the police station to file a report, where she is granted a rather perfunctory interview by Billy Baldwin [after — I’m sure you’ve never seen this before — he disarms a psycho suspect who grabs a gun and starts blasting in the stationhouse] just long enough to establish that lawyers are amoral scum who let criminals go free, the Florida police are corrupt fascist tools on the take, and [what a coincidence] that he’s just split up with his girlfriend Salma Hayek, who drops by to register a protest against his dilatory approach to moving out by dumping a truckload of his personal possessions in the street. Meanwhile Dan Hedaya walks briefly through the scenario as a scumbag lawyer [indeed he is to the manner born], but, in a testimonial to his own good judgment, keeps right on going; and some very unsavory characters with Russian accents are doing something nefarious in a rusty old freighter off the coast — which, I guess, entails whacking our heroine. We repair to her beachside mansion, which sports a lot of brightly lit windows before which she habitually parades in a state of undress; here Baldwin happens by with some unfinished paperwork just as the bomb some Slavic humorist planted in her television goes off, blowing her off the balcony and into the pool. Baldwin deters the wouldbe assassin from finishing her off with machinegun fire by flying through the air firing his forty-fives just like Chow Yun Fat. "Whoever's after you, they're real pros," he remarks. “It would be embarrassing to be killed by amateurs,” she replies. How true. Having thus officially Met Cute, our protagonists repair to a safehouse, where they remain undiscovered just long enough to start taking the first of a long series of showers. Alas, the cunning Russian fiends have been busily filling their computer screens with Unix pathnames in Cyrillic characters, hack into the legendary Pizza Database, and then into the delivery guy himself [“My pizzas are getting cold!” he protests when they cut him off — "And so are you," says the hitman], with the result that Billy has to dash out of the shower and run around a darkened apartment naked with his gun in his hand [and surely there must be a song in that.] At any rate they now realize They Can Trust No One, and after that they're young, they’re beautiful, they’re on the road and on the run in a stylized southFloridian landscape with palm trees and skies so heavily filtered they look like a fucking Tiffin filter ad on the back cover of the
American Cinematographer, their tshirts are torn, their faces are streaked with photogenic dirt even though the action grinds to a halt every few minutes so that they can take more showers, they bark at one another testily right up to the point at which they abruptly start sucking face and clawing each other's clothing off, they're harried by gunsels and must shoot back, they keep leaping toward the camera away from explosions behind them which fill the sky, the cops are after them, the Russian mob is after them, the geeks at the computer store are after them, the world pursues them and they must fly, fly, to the round earth’s imagin’d corners, where they’re chased through the locker room of the Miami Dolphins’ cheerleaders by a truckload of pigs and an FBI guy who has to be a phony because he smokes cigars... . — Sheesh, I think they really sank that rusty old freighter. Was that the terminal whammy? — And in the dismal annals of supermodel movie debuts, was this even close to being the worst? — "It's all right," he says, "it's over." One can only hope.
____________Quest for dirt (8/23/95)
