CHINA MOON

We're in Florida, so inevitably this is a tale of a guy who makes the mistake of getting involved with a woman who is unhappily married to a rich dude.

The sap in question is homicide detective Kyle Bodine, played by Ed Harris.  Given his job it is very predictable that (a) the husband will get killed (b) Kyle will be implicated in the killing, and (c) he will be investigating the crime.  

Sure enough all this comes to pass, with the important wrinkle that it is Kyle's junior partner Lamar (Benicio del Toro) who does an ace job of working out what happened.  It turns out there is a good reason for his excellent police work in this particular case, which we'll get to.

The femme fatale is Rachel (Madeleine Stowe) who is married to nasty Charles Dance, who himself is having a steamy affair with one of his employees, and who has a habit of knocking Rachel around.  

Kyle falls for Rachel in a big way, and considering the scene where she undresses before jumping into a lake for a midnight swim, who can blame him?  

But although this film has echoes of 'Body Heat' made a decade earlier it is not an erotic thriller as such, more of a neo-noir.

The broad outlines of the plot (once we get to the end of the film) are fairly clear:

Rachel and (shock horror) Lamar have concocted a cunning plan to murder her husband;  and her seducing Kyle is part of this plan.

Rachel then actually develops feelings for Kyle and so decides on the very night she is supposed to murder her husband to run away with Kyle instead.

Husband catches her in the act of packing her suitcase, and when he starts getting violent she shoots him dead.  When Kyle comes upon the scene she persuades him to dispose of the body (in the aforementioned lake, where else?).

Lamar then does a splendid job of planting evidence so that very quickly Kyle becomes the prime suspect.

Kyle works out what has been going on and confronts Lamar.  Unfortunately this goes horribly wrong, with the result that Kyle gets killed by police officers, and Rachel in a fit of rage and grief kills Lamar.

Summarised like this it may seem that there is enough here to make a decent noir.

The trouble is, the moment you leave the cinema and start drilling down into the detail you realise that the plot has some large holes in it.  I am still unclear what the original murder plan was, and why Kyle needed to be sucked into it at all.  At one point Lamar says that he involved Kyle "as insurance", which left me none the wiser.  It seems to me that most likely Kyle being the fall guy was just bad luck given that the way Rachel's husband gets killed wasn't as originally planned, but frankly who knows?

But there's many a great film which has a dodgy plot ('Vertigo' being perhaps the best example).

Sadly the director here, one John Bailey, is no Hitchcock or even a Lawrence Kasdan.  He had a long career as a cinematographer so it's a bit of a mystery as to why he got the job of directing this.  It's not that he does a bad job, and the film looks great, but he is unable to generate much in the way of noir atmosphere or to raise the temperature of the film above tepid.  The ending in particular is quite a let-down.

Harris and Stowe do their very best but they are probably both miscast in that neither is great at showing passion.  Del Toro, as he is prone to do, looks quite detached throughout.  

I was never bored and it passed the time quite agreeably, but I can't really argue with the 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

RATING: x Curb Your Enthusiasm