The Last Seduction - The Big Head and the Little Head

Nov

5

The Last Seduction - The Big Head and the Little Head

≡ Category: Comedy, Movie Reviews, Recommended, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Suspense/Comedy
Director: John Dahl
Year: 1994

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

There’s a lot to admire about The Last Seduction. Sharp dialog, vigorous direction from John Dahl, a ferocious performance from Linda Fiorentino, the usual excellent character turn from J. T. Walsh, and more, but the movie founders on it’s basic premise.

It’s just impossible to believe that an average nice Joe, even from a cow town, would be stupid enough to be talked into committing murder, even with the psychological leverage the script by Steve Barancik supplies. I think part of the reason that John Dahl gives a bit of a comic spin to the proceedings beyond what the script demands is to finesse the believability issue. It doesn’t quite work, and this prevents The Last Seduction from being a near great movie.

Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) talks her husband Clay (Bill Pullman) into making a big drug deal. Within minutes, she skips town with the money. She gets stuck in a cowtown between NYC and Chicago, and needs to improvise a way to get her husband out of the picture. At first, Bridget hooks up with local boy Mike Swale (Peter Berg) because he’s “hung like a horse,” but then she starts getting an idea of how Mike could be even more useful.

Bridget starts playing with Mike’s mind, using sex, Mike’s secrets, greed and any other psychological crowbars she can muster to manipulate Mike, all so she can get him to do her bidding. Screenwriter Steve Barancik does a good a job as you could imagine in making all this believable, but there’s one little problem. You can’t hypnotize someone into doing something that’s against their basic nature. An attractive woman can manipulate a not very bright man into doing all sorts of things, but there are limits. If Barancik wanted his scenario to be truly believable, Mike should have been less fundamentally decent.

I know part of the point of the script is that Bridget is supposed to be a legendary beeatch, and the seduction of Mike is supposed to be an epic mindfu#%, but it isn’t believable in the end.

Still, many of Bridget’s strategies are very amusing. I enjoyed the way she dealt with the detectives on her trail. Also, J. T. Walsh’s lawyer was good for some chuckles.

Don’t get me wrong: The Last Seduction is very entertaining, but in the end, it’s a bit of a letdown, too. Until it reveals it’s endgame strategy, The Last Seduction is so clever that you expect to be conned along with Bridget’s marks, and love every minute of it. Too bad that anyone with two gray cells to rub together (that would include most of my readers) wouldn’t fall for Bridget’s wiles for two minutes. That puts the viewer on the outside, observing a fictional hick get taken for his overalls, knowing that real hicks aren’t as dumb as Mike. Kind of takes the fun out of the scenario.