Mike Chuhutsky is a good-looking, fairly bright guy trying to get by in Los Angeles. Sometimes he teaches tennis to wealthy matrons. Sometimes he lays carpet. Sometimes he deals drugs.
It's only in this last enterprise that he loses his wits. He and his unstable friend Pete pick up a stash of cocaine to deliver to a major dealer; when the kingpin's back is turned, the duo steal some of the product to sell themselves. The plan goes awry, Pete escapes and Mike is left to learn the hard way that small-time hustlers have less to fear from the police than they do from the higher-ups in their own line of work.
"Mike's Murder" is an unorthodox thriller that's less concerned with scaring viewers than it is with building a carefully controlled atmosphere of menace. Despite the movie's lurid-sounding title, director James Bridges is less concerned with the crime than with the repercussions it has on Mike's on-again, off-again lover, a bank teller named Betty Ann Parrish (Debra Winger).
Aside from a mutually satisfying one-night-stand and some half-hearted phone sex, Betty and Mike's relationship barely exists. Multiple months pass between their few encounters. But when Mike is slain in what his cohorts call an "enforcement killing," the usually unadventurous Betty finds herself drawn into an L.A. subculture where appearances mean a lot and money means everything. Mike's associates chop up their cocaine with gold razor blades and lounge around beside Olympic-size swimming pools ringed by Roman sculptures when they're not racing from deal to deal in pricey sportscars.
Everyone -- Betty included -- seems to build their lives around their car and their phone. An answering machine becomes Betty's primary link to the outside world, and when she's not at home listening to messages or waiting for calls, Betty is on the road, looking for people she's talked to on the phone. The characters in "Mike's Murder" often seem to be half-sleepwalking, drifting aimlessly until the rare times they bump into something that excites or arouses them. It's as if most of the movie was taking place during those early-evening/after-work hours when you're almost running on empty, unsure of whether to take a nap or to start dinner.
Winger, saddled with playing a woman who's more often reactive than active, does everything she can to bring Betty to life and to uncover some glimmers of personality in a shallowly written part. The strongest performance in the movie, however, comes from Darryl Larson as the jittery cokehead Pete. His is a truly eerie portrait of a man barely living on the edge. As Mike, Mark Keyloun doesn't exert the kind of magnetism that would make Betty a slave to his charms, a flaw which leaves the movie with a hollow center.
What does come across in "Mike's Murder" is a beautifully evoked, vaguely creepy atmosphere that hangs over every scene. The crime that sets the story in motion remains unsolved at the end, and perhaps that's how it should be. It's not important who really killed Mike Chuhutsky, Bridges seems to be saying. Not when it's so obvious what killed him. James Sanford
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