This is the sort of film that you leave, recognizing that the film as a whole never "came together", but trying to figure out just WHERE it went wrong. The script was (or at least should have been) intelligent, the actors were competent... so what went wrong?
The best answer I could come up with (and heaven knows I'm no big shot Hollywood critic) was the way James Woods portrayed the character of Jake. This guy should have come off as a bigger-than-life, high-level Mafioso type; I got the impression of a cheap hood who tried to make himself look big as the front man for the real boss. When Jake orders the ex-football player to do a routine murder and the jock goes along with it, it doesn't underscore what a big man Jake is; it cheapens the lead character to think that he'd take orders to commit murder from the weaselly underling.
It didn't help this movie in the long run - okay, maybe its box office - that the continuous play of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" on radio and MTV effectively made this movie a must-see... and regardless of how good the tune was and what it was nominated for, the lyrics had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what happened in the course of the movie.
The best answer I could come up with (and heaven knows I'm no big shot Hollywood critic) was the way James Woods portrayed the character of Jake. This guy should have come off as a bigger-than-life, high-level Mafioso type; I got the impression of a cheap hood who tried to make himself look big as the front man for the real boss. When Jake orders the ex-football player to do a routine murder and the jock goes along with it, it doesn't underscore what a big man Jake is; it cheapens the lead character to think that he'd take orders to commit murder from the weaselly underling.
It didn't help this movie in the long run - okay, maybe its box office - that the continuous play of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" on radio and MTV effectively made this movie a must-see... and regardless of how good the tune was and what it was nominated for, the lyrics had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what happened in the course of the movie.
