FILM REVIEW
Barb Wire: (Playboy pin-up turned into onscreen Pambo’
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BARB WIRE
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Mary Reilly: ‘sexual edge’
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CDPYCAT
After Seven, Hollywood might have given the serial killer genre 3 break for a while, but this redundant, rather reprehensible slice of would-be classy studio schlock proves a depressing experience.
Sigourney Weaver must have been stock for work to take on a role that sees her ignominiously strung up by the neck inside a toilet cubicle within the first five minutes, when her famous criminal psychologist is the subject of a sudden brutal attack by Harry Connick Jr’s hick sicko. Thrown into shock, Weaver spends virtually the rest of the movie holed up in her apartment, immobilised by an old- fashioned and very obvious plot device which sets her up as a sitting duck then brings police detective Holly Hunter to her door seeking assistance in solving a seemingly intractable sequence of slayings.
Though Hunter and sidekick Dermot Mulroney add a spot of amiable banter, it’s the portrayal of the mystery killer that sticks in the craw. True to the title, he’s a copycat, meticulously re-creating the torture and mutilation practices of a string of notorious psychos and leaving the film to luxuriate in the details as the recipes for carnage grow ever more elaborate. ‘My God, he’s going to do Ted Bundy,’ exclaim his trackers, and you can almost feel Jon Amiel’s movie drooling at the prospect.
1 j Elsewhere, the British director
'delivers the suspense with mechanical
persistence, but the whole concept
1 leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Weaver and Hunter deserve some sympathy for plodding through it, but
having signed on they must have
1 known what they were in for. Deeply inessential, even as Saturday night
V popcorn fodder. (Trevor Johnston)
1 Copycat (18) (Jon Amie], US, 1996)
I Sigourney Weaver, Holly Hunter, Harry Gonnick Jr, Dermot Mulroney. 123
1 mins. From Fri 3. General release.
1 ‘The director delivers the suspense with mechanical persistence, but the , whole concept leaves a nasty taste
in the mouth’
1
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD
A genuine good fellow among goodfellas, former gangster Jimmy The Saint (Andy Garcia) is persuaded
out of retirement by The Man With The
Plan (Christopher Walken), who wants Jimmy to frighten off his son’s ex- girlfriend’s new beau. Heluctantly, Jimmy gets together his old crew of patented psychos and oddballs, but things get out of hand and people end up dead. How they’re all marked men, as hired assassin Mr Shhh (Steve Buscemi) drops into Denver on a little business. But instead of leaving town by the 48-hour deadline as The Man advised, the soft-spoken and ever loyal Jimmy sticks around to help out his friends and accept the consequences.
Some of the best noir plots are shrouded with a veil of tatalism — Edmond D’Brien solving his own murder by slow poison in D.D.A., the shooting of Gabriel Byrne in the opening frames of The Usual Suspects — but Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead takes its dealings with death a stage further. The ultimatum placed upon Jimmy The Saint is tantamount to a doctor telling a patient he’s got a terminal disease, while Jimmy’s video business, which allows those about to die to pass on their wisdom to their loved ones, indicates the sense of responsibility towards others and the need to set one’s affairs in order when facing
1 mortality that will mark his actions as l the film progresses.
In these thematic respects, Denver is
I a million times more mature than the comic book gunplay of Pulp Fiction and far more uniform in tone than the
clever-clever twist of The Usual
Suspects. What we have here is the
rare fusion between a literate script, 3
quietly powerful central performance, a set of brilliantly eccentric 1 supporting turns and a visual style that plays as confidently with light and shadow as the story itself. See it .and send Keyser S'ose packing. (Alan Morrison) | Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (18) (Gary Fleder, US, 1995) Andy ' Garcia, Christopher Walken, Gabrielle (Anwar. 115 mins. From Fri 10. General 1 release. See feature.
‘A million times more mature than the comic book gunplay of Pulp Fiction’
1 1