PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
Talk about false advertising. The trailer for Palmetto tries to sell it as a sexy thriller. Strange, because there wasn't any sex and it wasn't very thrilling.
Woody Harrelson stars as Harry Barber (insert dick joke here), a ex-journalist currently serving a four years for exposing some sort of corruption in the sleepy Florida town of Palmetto. Harry is freed two years into his sentence after someone turns state's evidence. Bitter and resentful of his incarceration, Harry plans to head as far away from Palmetto as possible.
He sticks to his plan for all of two minutes, when ex-girlfriend Nina (Gina Gershon) meets Harry just after his prison release. The romance is quickly rekindled, but strangely not shown to the viewers. He starts to look for work the next day, but finds nothing suitable until he falls into the insipid plot line. The plot-line with no sex.
While sitting in a bar and ordering bourbon that he smells but never drinks, Harry eyes a curvy stranger using the phone. The dame is Rhea Malroux (Elisabeth Shue, The Saint), wife of the richest old guy with terminal lung cancer in town and she offers Harry a mysterious one-time high-paying job. They agree to meet at a bungalow on the outskirts of town to discuss the position further.
At the bungalow, Rhea reveals a plan to extort money from her rich husband. Her stepdaughter Odette (Chloe Sevigny, Gummo) will pretend to be the victim of a kidnapping with the $500,000 ransom payable them both. Harry would clear ten percent for simply writing the ransom note and collecting the cash. Using the popular `Are you wearing a wire? Let me frisk you to be good and sure' ploy to cop a feel, Harry seals the deal with some steamy, but again unshown sex.
Predictably, once the plan is in place, things fall apart for Harry. He has fallen right into somebody's trap, but has no idea whom. Leaving a laughably unmistakable trail of clues that makes the Brown-Goldman murder scene seem sterile, Harry tries to right each wrong that he finds, but only manages to fall deeper and deeper into the scam. How this guy was smart enough to unmask corruption as a reporter, I will never know.
There are some pretty cool twists in the last twenty minutes or so, but I was so bored by that point that it hardly seemed to matter. Director Volker Schlondorff (The Handmaid's Tale) presents the story with all of the emotion of a cold heartless German. As a side note, Volker Schlondorff was going to be my stage name if I ever decided to go into porn.
Harrelson plays the slow-witted Harry not unlike each of his previous film characters. The unique casting of Shue as the naughty seductive bombshell and Gershon as the steady vulnerable girlfriend seems reversed from their norm, which is not necessarily a good thing. Sevigny and the oddly subdued Michael Rapaport stand out in supporting roles. Did I mention that there was no sex?
I wasn't going to bring this up, but if I had just gotten released from prison and had Gina Gershon as an eager girlfriend, I would not have had time to get wrapped up in a bad mystery like this. I'd be too busy getting what this move promised, but never delivered.
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