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So much of the dialogue of this gambling drama is devoted to explaining who owes what to whom and at what penalty interest, I found myself thumbing mentally through my own bills, concluding that what America could really use is a motion picture about credit-card debt. Meanwhile, Damon, who looks about as natural in a dim, smoke-filled room as Ben Affleck would in a flophouse, was sitting down to yet another round of high-stakes poker.
Damon plays a Manhattan law school student and card shark who, for the sake of his girlfriend (Mol), swears off the game to hit the books. Then Norton, an old friend from both the gambling parlor and prep school (interesting combination), is back on the streets after a stint in prison. Norton promptly tempts Damon back into the game. Prone to cheating, he also racks up thousands of dollars in bets, relying on Damon's good name as credit, then sticks his buddy with the bill for his losses. Damon, eager not to have his astronaut-handsome looks stomped on by a burly bruiser of a collector, gambles everything on a game with Malkovich, as the powerful Russian leader of one of the biggest poker rooms in town.
Nothing here clicks for the simple reason that no one has bothered to supply Damon, the film's key player and narrator, with a convincing psychological motivation for his obsession. (And yet Landau, in a supporting role as a law professor, has been given not one but two misty-eyed speeches about how he broke his parents' hearts by not becoming a rabbi.) Damon is forced to fall back on the charm of his slow-spreading smile and the fact that he looks good in a crew-neck sweater. But for all we know, he "goes out" for poker because he thinks it's a varsity sport.
Norton is amusingly jolly and scuzzy but eventually fades from sight. Malkovich, typically flamboyant, has come up with an accent full of unexpected pops and squeaks, and he literally sprinkles chips onto the poker table. He's silly, but at least he's entertaining. (R)
Bottom Line: A poor hand
Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter
Steve Prefontaine, the dominating distance runner who died at 24 in a 1975 car wreck, wasn't one for clever tactics. His running strategy was simple: Stay in front.
Without Limits, a movie about Pre (as his fans always called him), could have taken a lesson from the runner. The film is a choice, intelligent work and features a blazing performance by Crudup (Inventing the Abbotts) as Pre and a wily, subtle one by Sutherland as running guru Bill Bowerman, his coach at the University of Oregon (and the co-founder of Nike). Limits is the second film about the athlete to cross the finish line; Prefontaine, in which Jared Leto chugged along as the brash distance champ, already came through theaters over a year ago with scant notice.
Both movies run the same track, showing Prefontaine's working-class upbringing as the only son of German-speaking parents, his college years, his failure to place at the 1972 Munich Olympics and his battles over rules set by the powerful Amateur Athletics Union. And both have fun with Bowerman's cooking up shoe soles in his wife's waffle iron ("Not again," whines the wife in Limits. "I promised the kids waffles for Sunday brunch"). But Limits, as directed by Robert Towne (Tequila Sunrise) and cowritten by Towne and Kenny Moore (a writer for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and a marathoner who ran with Prefontaine at Munich), is clearly the superior film. For those who missed Prefontaine but still care avidly about the subject, this one is worth seeing. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Late start, strong finisher
Kevin Bacon, Mary Stuart Masterson, Evan Rachel Wood
Timothy Hutton, who won an Oscar as the sensitive boy swamped by tragedy in Ordinary People in 1981, makes his directorial debut with the story of a sensitive girl similarly swamped. Ten-year-old Harriet (10-year-old Wood), whose mother runs a motor lodge in Pennsylvania in the early '60s, is already predisposed to run away from a town that considers her odd. She befriends a mentally handicapped man (Bacon) stopping off at the lodge with his mother en route to being deposited in a home. Shaken by a death in the family and unexpected news from her sister (Masterson), she and her new friend flee into the forest.
It's not impossible to make something fresh out of this sort of sad-idyllic tale of girlhood. Fly Away Home did, with its geese and its beautiful cinematography. Ever After, a surprise hit of the summer, adds psychological realism to Cinderella. But China is seldom better than precious and, once the friends pretend-wed out in the woods, just weird. And other than Marian Seldes, as Bacon's tense, careworn mother, the performances aren't of note. (PG)—T.G.
Bottom Line: Doesn't quite dig its way to daylight
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Van Damme, in a recent interview with ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, confessed that his career of late had come unstrung because of cocaine abuse. Given the quality of this latest action picture—and his screen presence, which consists of not much more than a pair of biceps accompanied by a loud voice—his confession could be viewed as a preemptive apology to audiences.
Van Damme and onetime Saturday Night Live regular Rob Schneider play bottom-of-the-rung blue-jeans exporters in Hong Kong on the eve of the British colony's transfer to Communist China. The two are unwittingly drawn into a terrorist plot involving remote-controlled, button-size bombs concealed in products shipped out to the rest of the world. (The movie opens with the odd sight of a shipment of dolls exploding at sea.) Van Damme runs, rolls and kick-boxes his way out of one scrape after another, but these scenes are almost all indifferently staged and paced. You could probably hold a grade-school spelling bee with greater suspense. (R)—T.G.
Bottom Line: Knock it right off your list
Maurice Dean Wint, Nicky Guadagni
If you have ever been trapped in a malfunctioning elevator with strangers and found them so irritating that you tried prying open the doors yourself, you'll get the idea behind Cube. This is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller shot on a single set in which everyday folk—a cop, a doctor, a student, an ex-con, an office worker and an idiot savant—wake one day to find themselves locked together in a cube-like room. They have no idea how they ended up there, nor who imprisoned them. To escape this mysteriously malevolent environment—adjoining cubes are booby-trapped with lethal devices that cause instant death—the characters will have to cooperate and trust each other. Fat chance.
Watching Cube, a Canadian film featuring a cast of unfamiliar actors, one is impressed that tyro director Vincenzo Natali managed such stylistic flair on an obviously skimpy budget. The film's plot and characters, however, are right out of a so-so Twilight Zone episode. (R)—L.R.
Bottom Line: Not nearly as three-dimensional as its title
>TOUCH OF EVIL
At the end of this gaudily dark thriller, Marlene Dietrich says of Orson Welles's just expired character, "He was some kind of a man." She had that right—and Touch of Evil, written and directed by Welles but taken out of his hands and heavily reworked by Universal upon its original, 1958 release, is some kind of a film. Funny, scary and always mesmerizing, it is considered by many film critics and fans to rank second only to Citizen Kane among Welles's works.
Now the movie is being rereleased in a carefully reedited version that brings the 40-year-old film about corruption and murder in a Mexican border town as close as possible to Welles's original conception. If you see this touched-up Touch of Evil—and you should—you will realize that you have seen this movie before. Well, sort of. Evil's famous, three-minute opening crane shot, which in a single, complicated take sets up the film's seedy locale, its leading characters (newlyweds Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh) and a pivotal car bombing, inspired Robert Altman's first scene in The Player and, more recently, Brian De Palma's in Snake Eyes. And remember in Get Shorty when John Travolta mouths the lines to the movie he's watching? It's Touch of Evil. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
