Desperate Hours
You know that you are in some DEEP shit when a movie that has as much talent on hand as this one and is supposed to be a taut, tense psychological thriller winds up making the viewer laugh more often than not at how bad it is and is not even competent on a technical level! More or less, this can probably be attributed to director Michael Cimino, who shocked the world with his fluke Oscar win for The Deer Hunter and then became one of the top purveyors of cinematic shit from there on out. Mickey Rourke stars as a criminal serving a long sentence for manslaughter who busts out of jail using his lawyer / girlfriend’s help, then instead of heading straight out of the country, decides to hole up at a nearby suburban family’s house and hold them hostage just long enough for the girlfriend to catch up to him so they can leave the country together. Right there with that pointless excuse for a plot we know we’re in trouble, made doubly worse by the fact we’re told early on that the Rourke character possesses a “genius IQ” and yet makes one dumb risky mistake after another (One almost wishes Robert DeNiro’s Neil Macauley from Heat would show up and smack Rourke over the head for his stupidity). The cast, while talented, only show glimmers of promise of what could have been: Rourke smartly turns the charisma on early, and does nearly everything he can to hold the film together but alas, eventually gets shot down by the ridiculous script and idiotic decisions it forces his character to make; Anthony Hopkins as the father held hostage sounds promising, as this was made a year before his superstardom in Silence Of The Lambs, but sadly he comes off as miscast and bored; Mimi Rogers (one of the true underrated beauties of recent years) starts strong as the wife and mother, but soon descends into a sobbing frightened mess even as the script has its one interesting dynamic of Rourke being protective of her from his accomplices; Kelly Lynch as the lawyer / girlfriend gets some nudity in there, but her character comes off as pathetically weak instead of the strong confident double-dealing fox as she was initially advertised; Elias Koteas as Rourke’s brother and David Morse as the third accomplice come off as so bone-headingly stupid that we almost hope to see Rourke cut some dead weight and blow one of them away, particularly Morse, who is literally so dumb that it makes the viewer wince; and Shawnee Smith brings a bit of life to the film as the teenage daughter bent on showing her defiance to the criminals, even having the courage to laugh in Rourke’s face at one point when he tries to intimidate her; However, special notice must be given to Lindsay Crouse as the FBI Special Agent in charge of the manhunt, as this has to go down as one of the worst female performances in cinematic history: Speaking all her lines in a bizarre, phonetic Southern accent that accentuates every syllable, her role alternately comes across as both robotic and as a female Forrest Gump, with her doing such unbelievable things as handing loaded guns to civilians before they enter the house with Rourke to flying her airplane no more than 20 feet over Lynch’s car while doing surveillance on her, one wonders why she wasn’t nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress (or maybe even made it to The Razzie Hall Of Fame) which is ironic since Rourke WAS nominated for Worst Actor for this role. As said, the supposedly unbearable tension is constantly subverted by unintentional comedic moments (besides when Crouse is onscreen) like Rourke allowing Morse to carry an unwrapped dead body out of the house and stuff it in the trunk of their car in BROAD DAYLIGHT to when Morse finishes disposing of the body and emerges on the side of the road covered completely in blood only to see two scantily clad teenage girls whom he starts chasing down to give him a ride to when Lynch arrives at the house and reunites with Rourke, only for him to give her a quick rogering right there in the foyer while Hopkins stands there and watches! As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the film stands as one of the worst edited pieces I’ve ever seen, with abrupt cuts being made to the next scene before someone can even finish their line in the previous one, and important plot points (like how Rourke comes to get a gun with no bullets in it) completely obliterated by the awful timing of the editor. That, plus not one but two missed opportunities during the climax to have a somewhat cool ending in favor of a more conventional “blaze of glory”-type denouement, all add up to probably being the worst movie in the career of most of its actors, and an embarrassingly inept example of filmmaking as a whole…
3/10