After the Sunset (2/10)

by Tony Medley

Prospectively, this looks like it can’t miss. With a cast of Pierce Brosnan and the voluptuous Selma Hayek, music by Lalo Schifrin, cinematography by multi-nominated Dante Spinotti, and a location in the Bahamas, what could go wrong? The answer begins and ends with the story by Paul Zbyscewski and the script by Zbyscewski and  Craig Rosenberg.

It starts out pretty good as Max Burdett (Brosnan) is a jewel thief who is living with his girl friend, Lola Cirillo (Hayek) after victimizing FBI agent Stan Lloyd (Harrelson) in stealing a big diamond at a Lakers basketball game.

They run away to hide in the Caribbean, ostensibly for Max to retire, but then Lloyd shows up and says he thinks they’re going to steal another diamond that’s coming in on a cruise ship. They deny it.

As the story builds the first half hour isn’t terrible. But then it all falls apart. The characters are paper mâche, the story so predictable one wonders how anybody could foist it on an audience. The only thing that kept my attention was when Lola would bend over and the camera shot down her shirt to her navel. That’s great cinematography! Sometimes the camera gets so close to her cleavage that I was wondering if they were using some sort of long lens, because I couldn’t imagine the contortions involved in getting the camera that close. As you can tell by my wandering attention, the story was less than compelling.

Harrelson is truly an enigma. He’s in one terrible movie after another; he's always the same, couldn't display any other emotion than Woody Harrelson, the smiling sap, yet he keeps getting jobs. The only thing notable he ever accomplished was to get people to wear their baseball caps backward, thanks to one of his first terrible movies, master of the idiotic movie Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump (1992). The only thing good about this is that when you see someone with his baseball cap on backward, you know instantly that you’re dealing with a dope.

Except for Lola’s cleavage and the Bahamian location, this movie is a waste.

November 6, 2004

The End