Movie Review: It Could Happen To You (1994)

A romantic comedy loosely inspired by true events, It Could Happen To You is amiable enough and benefits from grounded Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda performances.

In New York City, Charlie Lang (Cage) is a kind-hearted police officer, happy to remain a beat cop working the streets with his partner Bo (Wendell Pierce). Charlie is married to the materialistic Muriel (Rosie Perez) who resents Charlie's lack of ambition and their modest Queens apartment.

Yvonne Biasi (Fonda) is a compassionate coffee shop waitress, and she has to declare bankruptcy when her no-good husband Eddie (Stanley Tucci) racks up massive credit card debt. Yvonne and Eddie are separated, but she cannot afford to go through a divorce.

After a quick coffee stop Charlie finds himself short of cash for a tip and promises Yvonne half his lottery ticket. The draw is that night, and the ticket wins $4 million. Although Muriel is furious, Charlie insists on honouring his promise and sharing half with Yvonne. All their lives change forever, and as Muriel starts indulging her every whim, Charlie finds himself increasingly attracted to Yvonne, although the reemergence of Eddie adds further complications.

It Could Happen To You adheres strictly to genre conventions, and adds a layer of genuine sweetness. Charlie and Yvonne are an impeccable fit, both saddled with insufferable spouses, and director Andrew Bergman never introduces even an iota of doubt that the cop and waitress will end up together. With down-to-earth Queens locations, a relaxed tone and an ideal run time of 101 minutes, the film is easy to enjoy.

The couple-to-be are almost too perfect: he helps New Yorkers cross the street and plays ball with the neighbourhood kids every night. She looks after all her regular customers with an outstanding level of bona fide affection. Which raises the question as to how they ended up with their polar-opposite spouses. Muriel is greed personified, hyper-agitated by her man's disinterest in financial wealth. Eddie is nothing but a slimy leach.

Clumsy narration courtesy of an Isaac Hayes character named, of all things, Angel, as well as globs of exposure for the New York Post, are among the other unnecessary distractions.

Where the Jane Anderson script dares to be original is on doubling down on a level of natural goodness and old fashioned charm. Charlie and Yvonne create an irony-free, honesty-rich bubble and gradually work their way towards an authentic love, casting aside the edgy snarkiness often deployed as a humour device. Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda buy into the wholesome personas and add doses of benevolent elegance to the romance.

A lottery win brought two perfectly compatible people together, and the only irony on display is their joint understanding of what true affluence means.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Kiss Of The Dragon (2001)

A straightforward martial arts action flick, Kiss Of The Dragon delivers the requisite high energy fight scenes but little else of value.

Beijing police detective Liu Siu-jian (Jet Li) arrives in Paris to help Inspector Jean-Pierre Richard (Tchéky Karyo) arrest high ranking Chinese drug smuggler Mr. Big (Ric Young) and his mysterious local contact. But Liu is walking into a trap, because the corrupt Richard is the French connection in the international criminal ring. Richard kills Mr. Big and tries to incriminate Liu, forcing the Beijing detective to flee into hiding at a Chinatown safehouse.

Liu eventually teams up with prostitute Jessica (Bridget Fonda), an American who is forcibly working for Richard as he holds her daughter at an orphanage. Liu gets some help from the Chinese embassy but is mostly on his own as he fights against an army of heavily armed corrupt cops to clear his name.

Directed by Chris Nahon, Kiss Of The Dragon serves the sole purpose of highlighting Jet Li's exceptional martial arts skills. And Li is terrific, taking on hordes of bad guys in large groups at a time, and efficiently disposing of them with ruthless efficiency. With a minimum of special effects, the fight scenes are choreographed with artistic beauty and sneaky humour. The film satisfies the requirement of one good fight about every seven minutes or so.

In between, there is nothing to latch onto. The plot is elemental and features an inordinate amount of gaping holes in common sense and logic, served by mechanical acting and dialogue exchanges. The villain Inspector Richard is straight out of a comic book for juveniles, and the story of a cop on strange turf, battling a frame-up and seeking revenge is as basic as an action movie can get. The honest prostitute with a heart of gold and a child she yearns for completes the mandated check boxes.

The Paris locations add a modicum of interest and Liu's Chinatown hideout along a derelict back lane provides an earthy backdrop. But otherwise Kiss Of The Dragon is plenty of flying limbs and too few cerebral whims.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

The Movies Of Bridget Fonda

All movies starring Bridget Fonda and reviewed on the Ace Black Blog are linked below:

Easy Rider (1969, uncredited)

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Single White Female (1992)

Singles (1992)

Point Of No Return (1993)

It Could Happen To You (1994)

Jackie Brown (1997)

Kiss Of The Dragon (2001)

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
The Index of Movie Stars is here.

Movie Review: Jackie Brown (1997)

A crime film saluting the blaxploitation sub-genre without exploiting it, Jackie Brown offers the promise of provocative characters and a compelling plot but takes too long to eventually not achieve much.

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is a down-on-her-luck flight attendant for a low-cost airline operating between Mexico and Los Angeles. To make ends meet she acts as a courier for gunrunner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), importing his overseas cash in $50,000 increments. Ordell's friends include surfer girl Melanie (Bridget Fonda) and the none-too-bright ex-con Louis Gara (Robert De Niro), who are both often stoned into uselessness. Ordell's operation hits trouble when Beaumont (Chris Tucker), another of his couriers, is arrested. To silence him, Ordell uses the services of bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to spring Beaumont and then summarily kills him.

But Beaumont had already alerted cops Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) and Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) that Jackie is another of Ordell's couriers, and she is also arrested. Ordell tries to pull the same trick, using Cherry to release Jackie in order to silence her, but she is one step ahead of him. Jackie instead offers to help Ordell bring all $500,000 of his money in from Mexico in one shot under the noses of Ray and Mark, while at the same time striking a deal with the cops to deliver Ordell to them. With Max developing an attraction towards Jackie, a convoluted plot of cross and double cross unfolds, sucking in Max, Melanie and Louis, with Jackie in the middle of it all playing the most dangerous game of all.

Jackie Brown finds writer and director Quentin Tarantino at his most retrained. An adaptation of the Elmore Leonard book Rum Punch, Jackie Brown stays away from the blood and gore orgies of excess that define many of Tarantino's works. The film is also an unexpectedly calm appreciation of blaxploitation, more a stylistic nod to the music and aesthetics of the early 1970s trend and less a recreation of the in-your-face, all-mindless-action-all-the-time compositions that defined the genre.

What remains is a long running time of over 150 minutes reliant on character and plot to generate and maintain momentum. Both elements are adequate but not fully successful. The preponderance of characters appears to be more about populating the film with plenty of sidekicks, and few of the players are fleshed out to any meaningful degree. Melanie and Louis (despite two terrific performances by Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro) get plenty of screen time but remain a shallow sideshow, while the detective Nicolette drifts in and out of the movie with no conviction.

The main characters offer more, but not by much. Ordell's defining trait is an endless stream of profanities, Max is suitably tired and circumspect after a life spent handling scum, and Jackie is juicing the odds for the first time in her life. But despite the film riding on their shoulders they also remain surprisingly opaque as individuals worth investing in. Instead of character definition, the film offers endless and slow-moving facial close-ups, style failing to mask the absence of script insight.

As for the plot, it maintains a modicum of interest but eventually starts to collapse under its own weight. After an inordinately long set-up, the plotting and counter-plotting to transfer envelopes and bags stuffed with money among criminals at a suburban mall all gets to be too intricate given the less than sympathetic characters.

In the final third of the film Tarantino does a nice job showing the same scenes from different perspectives, sometimes revealing surprises with just the slightest shift of angle. But ultimately there is too much peripheral detail and not enough core depth.

Jackie Brown is a rich attempt at a cerebral crime thriller. It enjoys a steady stream of quality, but lacks the essential spark of imagination to ever properly take off.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Singles (1992)

A romantic comedy set at the peak of Seattle's grunge scene, Singles captures a unique moment in time and music, but is an otherwise unremarkable story of typical relationships among young adults.

The film focuses on the love lives of twentysomething friends living in and around a Seattle apartment rental block. Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) is an environmental activist. After getting burned by an affair with a duplicitous foreign student, she meets Steve (Campbell Scott), an engineer with the department of transportation also smarting from a recent breakup. They start a relationship that will have its fair share of unexpected ups and downs.

Meanwhile Steve's neighbour Janet (Bridget Fonda) is obsessed with musician Cliff (Matt Dillon), a member of the grunge band Citizen Dick. She wants to be dedicated to him, but Cliff is unsure he wants to commit to anyone, as his mediocre band struggles for a breakthrough. Also looking for a mate is Debbie (Sheila Kelley), who is friends with Steve and Janet. She decides to go the video dating route, and creates a video to try and find the perfect match.

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, Singles is more about mood, feel and music and less about plot and characters. The film is a celebration of a Seattle's unexpected moment in the spotlight of the music world, when grunge erupted as the sound of the day and bands went from underground to global stardom within months. The film features the music of Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney among others, and band members, mostly before their fame, appear in supporting roles.

As for the relationship stories, they are simple and routine. Crowe's writing is not sharp enough to highlight any of the personalities, and the characters do not move beyond pleasant, generally inoffensive and only vaguely interesting. There is nothing wrong with the romance, comedy and frequent fourth wall breaks; there just isn't anything too compelling on offer, either. Crowe does earn points for keeping his characters deglamorized and refreshingly real, in keeping with grunge's no-frills blue collar aesthetic.

The ensemble cast does what is required, both Kyra Sedgwick and Bridget Fonda playing up the cutesy angle, while Campbell Scott downs in blandness. Matt Dillon as the generally clueless band leader of a mediocre band could have emerged with most distinction, but is given relatively little to do. His band Citizen Dick is a reminder that even in Seattle of 1992, that there were some grunge bands too crap to break out. Bill Pullman (a plastic surgeon), Tom Skerritt (Seattle's Mayor), Jeremy Piven (a store check-out clerk), Eric Stoltz (a random street mime), Victor Garber and Paul Giamatti all appear in small roles.

In addition to the music, Singles is most famous for possibly being the inspiration for the television series Friends. Regardless, the film is like a familiar friend: fun to hang out with, but not necessarily a sizzling experience.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Single White Female (1992)

A psychological thriller that brushes against Hitchcockian levels of ever increasing menacing tension, Single White Female is a compelling descent into the turmoil caused by a deeply disturbed mind.

Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda) is a struggling New York software designer, deeply in love with live-in boyfriend Sam (Steven Weber), and friends with upstairs neighbour Graham (Peter Friedman). Allie's love life collapses when she discovers that Sam cheated on her with his ex-wife. She kicks him out, advertises for a room-mate, and soon Hedy Carlson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) moves in. Although a bit frumpy, Hedy at first appears sensitive and caring, but she gradually reveals obsessive tendencies towards Allie. Hedy adopts Allie's style in fashion and hair, and starts to take liberties with Allie's mail, voice messages and personal belongings.

Things go from uncomfortable to creepy when Allie and Sam reconcile, and Hedy feels like an unwelcome guest in her own apartment. She starts to actively sabotage the relationship between Allie and Sam, and finally turns outright hostile against all the foundations of Allie's life.

Neither Bridget Fonda nor Jennifer Jason Leigh ever made it to Grade A stardom levels; but both actresses are at their best, and possibly their career peaks, in Single White Female. Fonda oozes confident trendiness mixed with the vulnerability that comes from the ground shifting and the walls closing in, the quintessential wannabe career woman unable to break a sequence of body-blow betrayals: her former business partner; her current boyfriend; and now her room-mate.

Leigh's role is darker, more transformational, and ultimately chilling. Initially appearing normal but marching mercilessly into a dance on the edge of madness, Leigh embraces the role of catalyst, aggressor and severely damaged victim.

Barbet Schroeder gets the best out of his two lead actresses, and he imaginatively introduces the New York building that houses Allie's apartment as a menacing co-star. The sturdy, imposing art nouveau structure can't help but seep impending evil, and Schroeder finds all the internal and external perspectives to maximize the sense of doom.

At its climax, Single White Female probably turns the screw twice more than necessary, dropping into cliched and well-stripped "not dead yet" territory. The drama and engagement reside in the journey more than the resolution, and Single White Female has a patient and delectably ominous slide towards its final acts of madness.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Point Of No Return (1993)

A remake of Luc Besson's film Nikita, the Hollywood treatment not unexpectedly strips the soul out of the story and replaces it with abject superficiality. In Point Of No Return the action sequences are over-muscled on steroids, the character motivations are non-existent, the romance is phony, and the tits-and-ass are plentiful and utterly superfluous. Bridget Fonda tries hard to bring some depth and conviction to the central character of Maggie (nom de guerre Nina), but is undermined by a dull script and director John Badham insisting on filming her in her underwear at every opportunity.

In Washington DC, Maggie is a drugged-out criminal, running with a gang of lost and vicious youth. A robbery of a drug store goes wrong, and in the ensuing shoot-out Maggie blows out the brains of a police officer. She is convicted and sentenced to death.

Bob (Gabriel Byrne) rescues Maggie from the lethal injection by enrolling her, initially very much against her will, into a top secret agency that does the government's dirty work by eliminating high profile undesirables. In addition to combat and weapons training, Maggie's instructors include Amanda (Anne Bancroft), who teaches her social etiquette. As she is polished into an expert assassin, Bob naturally takes a much more than just professional interest in Maggie's progress.

Upon mastering all the required skills, Maggie is given the code name Nina and unleashed into society, where she quickly meets and falls in love with J.P. (Dermot Mulroney), although she cannot share much pillow talk with him since her job includes tasks such wiping out criminal cartels by blowing up entire hotel floors and targeted assassinations using high powered sniper rifles. Eventually Maggie grows tired of the killing, Bob grows tired of J.P., and a mission-gone-wrong activates The Cleaner (Harvey Keitel) to kill everyone in sight.

There are some slick moments in Point Of No Return, and with a healthy suspension of disbelief, the action sequences are entertaining in a Schwarzeneggeresque way, with plenty of high-tech weaponry, fiery explosions, an endless number of goons materializing from nowhere to get killed by Nina, and no shortage of impressive stunts. And the small portion of the film with The Cleaner starts to become funny in a good way, whether intentional or not. Fonda tackles her role fearlessly and manages to progress with the character, while everyone else around her spouts cliches with statuesque fluidity.

But there is no escaping the ham-handed approach of Point Of No Return, a point where apparently subtlety is a lost art, and where all the points need to be driven home with a sledgehammer.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.