THE REAL MCCOY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1993 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Kim Basinger, Val Kilmer, Terence Stamp. Screenplay: William Davies & William Osborne. Director: Russell Mulcahy.
Some movies require you to turn off your brain in order to watch. Then there are movies that require you to accept that everyone *in* the movie has turned off *their* brains. THE REAL MCCOY is both. It's charmless, molasses-slow and so full of genuinely stupid people that the film commission of Atlanta, where THE REAL MCCOY is set, might well consider some sort of ritual suicide for their complicity in this humiliation.
THE REAL MCCOY opens with bank robber Karen McCoy (Kim Basinger) being arrested in the middle of a job. Six years later, Karen is out on parole and looking to stay straight. She soon bumps into J. T. Barker (Val Kilmer), a hapless would-be thief who idolizes Karen. J. T. also has ties to Jack Schmidt (Terence Stamp), the man who blew the whistle on Karen six years earlier for refusing to work with him. Schmidt, who is in cahoots with Karen's sleazy parole officer (Gailard Sartain), again wants Karen to help him stage a robbery. This time he has some leverage: Karen's kidnapped son. Just when she thought she was out, they keep pulling her back *in.*
Contrivances and sloppy plotting fly off the screen so fast and furiously you have to duck to avoid being hit by them. Leading the list is the Jack Schmidt character, who through unexplained but presumably foul mains is already extremely wealthy when our story begins. There is no reason given why he should need or want to get involved in another crime, let alone why he would actually participate in the break-in. Karen's initial encounter with J. T. during a botched convenience store hold-up also strains the limits of credibility. It would have been simple enough to have them somehow entangled at that point, but instead they run into each other the next day because they're leaving their parole officers at exactly the same moment. Small world, eh? Then there's the convenient car trouble during an attempted escape, and pet tigers which, through the power of the Laws of Bad Cinema, must inevitably confront someone who has blundered into their cage. However, the buffoon prize goes to the Atlanta police, who come off like the Keystone Kops on a bad day.
But the fun doesn't end there in the shambles of a script by William Davies and William Osborne. There is also the absence of a single, solitary interesting character. Karen is earnest and single-minded in her motherly devotion, but lacking any kind of edge which would make her a convincing criminal, and Basinger is not a thespian adept at fleshing out flimsy material. Schmidt is a flaccid villain, the parole officer is a complete blank, and Karen's son and ex-husband might as well be furniture. Only Kilmer's J. T. is remotely appealing, but his one potentially intriguing quality, his ineptitude, is never developed. In fact, Kilmer disappears during the middle of the film, just when his admiration for Karen could have made for an interesting sub-plot.
I might have been more forgiving if the pacing had been more appropriate to a caper comedy, but THE REAL MCCOY goes nowhere fast. Various scenes of sneaking and skulking seem to take forever, and some end with no reason evident why they didn't end up on the cutting room floor. Even the reasonably clever climactic break-in falls victim to this syndrome, including a scene of one of the thieves drilling open a vault which lasts (I kid you not) four minutes. There is no tension in the scene, just tedium. Russell Mulcahy (HIGHLANDER) is a director with some style, and indeed THE REAL MCCOY looks reasonably good, but he completely stumbles in the editing room.
There are so many big problems with THE REAL MCCOY that I'm tempted to overlook the little ones. Like Karen disarming one of Schmidt's henchmen and throwing his gun into the middle of a park where her son is playing. Like a fountain crushed when a van runs into it reappearing in one piece a few moments later.
Tempted. But I'm pretty good at resisting temptation.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 years hard time: 2
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel .
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews