By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * * )
By year's end, strikes permitting, Gene Hackman's rumpled face will have stared mournfully from 85 movies. One of the hardest-working actors is contracted, at age 71, to make five pictures in 2001. This one is different from so many of his blockbusters:
he sat on the French thriller Garde a Vue for 20 years until he felt the time was right to remake Claude Miller's award-winner.
e.g. likes to be a bit different so I'll disagree with most critics: I reckon this is one of his finer performances in a film that probably plays better on the small screen.
It's set in Puerto Rico after a devastating hurricane. Henry Hearst (Hackman) is a bigshot lawyer with a young and beautiful wife, Chantel (Monica Bellucci), who saw him talking to her niece two years ago and hasn't been to bed with him since.
Police chief Victor Benezet (Morgan Freeman) believes Hearst is taking out his frustrations on local girls found raped and murdered. The policeman believes that he can get the truth out of Hearst. Not that he is an angel: Hearst knows his interrogator is not squeaky-clean himself.
It's the Hackman show. Freeman and Bellucci are there to prowl and pose respectively while the hyperactive detective (Thomas Jane) shouts. And it works because director Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2, Ghost And The Darkness) knows that when he is blessed with a cast this talented, his role is to stand back and leave it to the actors.
Running time: 110 mins
Rental: Now
