JOHNNY HANDSOME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A lion-faced petty criminal is given a
new face and a new life if he is willing to turn his back on
two murderers who betrayed him. Yet another crime film set
in New Orleans with a rather nice bleak tone at times.
Rating: high +1.
John Sedley is going to get a second chance at life. Mickey Rourke plays John Sedley, who was born with massive cranial deformities known as "lionheadedness." In spite of Sedley having a good mind, his life has been a sequence of rejections, scrapes with the law, and foul-ups. Most recently he was involved in a heist in which two of his partners, Sunny Boyd and Rafe Garrett (played by Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen), murdered John's best friend, made off with the takings, and left John to take the rap. Then as an added stroke of viciousness they try to have him killed in prison. But the prison doctors want to give John a new name and a new. much improved face. He can take his new life or he can go back to his old life. His surgeon thinks he will go for the new life; Drones, the cynical police detective (played by Morgan Freeman) is convinced that John's unfinished business will just be too strong an attraction.
Want to know which he does? Well, director Walter Hill is known for violent action pictures such as 48 HOURS and RED HEAT. Hill seems to specialize in stories about particularly sadistic criminals and likes to create killers for whom simple killing seems too light a punishment. And Boyd and Garrett are no exceptions. Hill brings Rourke back to New Orleans, the site of Rourke's popular ANGEL HEART, although the New Orleans atmosphere is almost ignored in JOHNNY HANDSOME, indicating that Hill is nowhere the stylist that Alan Parker, director of ANGEL HEART, is. To Hill's credit, however, he does get some atmosphere by subduing the color of the film. (In spite of what Ebert and Siskel say, a good stylist really can create a bleaker feel in a scene with color than with monochrome. It is just easier to create a mood in monochrome.)
JOHNNY HANDSOME does not have a particularly original plot. Basically the same story was told 53 years earlier in THE MAN WHO LIVED TWICE. For that matter, both are really at heart THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. But JOHNNY HANDSOME is a better made film than most of Hill's other chase films. The mere fact that one particularly obnoxious woman in my audience irately complained because it did not have the ending she expected indicates that Hill is doing something right. I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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