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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
1996 |
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| Genre: |
BLACK COMEDY
CRIME
ROMANCE
THRILLER
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
109 |
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Comedy film noir about an ex-convict and a gangster’s moll who think up an ingenious way to steal two million dollars from the mafia.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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It may sound as if we’ve been here before, but one twist is that the ex-convict is a masculine lesbian (Gina Gershon) and the moll (Jennifer Tilly) is bisexual. The two women’s attraction for each other is portrayed with an erotic intensity which evokes memories of Body Heat and The Last Seduction; but the sex scenes are handled with restraint (as a result, they’re actually sexy) and one of the movie’s achievements is that their passion wins even a “straight” audience on to their side.
The film’s greatest strength is that it is fiendishly well plotted. Everyone behaves self-interestedly, rationally but unpredictably - especially the money-launderer (Joe Pantoliano) whom the anti-heroines are hoping to dupe. For most of the movie, the audience is left enjoyably in suspense as to what is going to go wrong next, and wondering whether Tilly’s femme fatale is playing everyone - including her accomplice - for a sucker.
This first effort at writer-direction by the Wachowski brothers, Larry and Andy, is hugely better than their first Hollywood script, the dire Stallone thriller Assassins. Even the violence is well handled: much more is implied than shown, and all of it packs a dramatic punch.
Obviously indebted to Scorsese, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, it’s a little too interested in camera angles and genre at the expense of humanity; it’s definitely at one remove from real life. Even so, it was an accomplished film noir, as full of danger and suspense as the great Hitchcock thrillers, very stylishly directed, and acted with conviction and sexual energy by two excellent female leads.
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, Corky ................ Gina Gershon 