MALICE
A film review by Sarah M. Elkins
Copyright 1993 Sarah M. Elkins
I have to compliment whoever made the TV ads for MALICE. For once, you get an accurate taste of the movie without the plot being given away. I would advise those intrigued by the ads to go ahead and see it before reading a review which gives away more than mine -- even reviewers like me who avoid giving spoilers without warning would be hard-pressed to review MALICE without at least hinting at some of the generous number of twists.
MALICE -- 1993, original, complex thriller
PLOT/KICK-OFF: A serial killer stalks a quiet college town. Meanwhile, one of the college profs meets the new hotshot surgeon and realizes that they knew each other in high school. Meanwhile, his wife suffers sharp abdominal pains from time to time. What will be the connections between these threads? Not what I thought!
CHARACTERS/ACTING: Alec Baldwin as the doctor, Bill Pullman as the college professor, Nicole Kidman as his wife, Bebe Neuwirth (Lillian on CHEERS) as the police detective. With the exception of Bebe's valiant attempt at some urban accent (Boston? Brooklyn? the Bronx? the fault could be mine in simply not being familiar enough with the locale), the acting is excellent, with a wide range demanded from Baldwin, Kidman, and Pullman.
CINEMATOGRAPHY/FX: Unobtrusive but sharp photography makes the cast and scenery look beautiful, antiseptic, or gritty as the plot demands. There's no one outstanding shot I can call to mind, but the look and feel will suffer a bit on the small screen.
SCORE/SOUND: Fine. Some pop & rock, and "mood" music.
VIOLENCE/GORE/LANGUAGE: Operating room scenes are a bit bloody but not the worst I've seen. Some obscenities and bullets thrown around. A nasty close-range fight (heads slammed into walls, objects swung at and hitting bodies).
SKIN/SITUATIONS: If you saw NYPD BLUES's opening night, expect a similar amount of female skin. More of Alec Baldwin than has been shown before, though various nekkid women on top of him (not at the same time or even in the same evening) barely cover certain essentials.
ANALYSIS: The movie is not a let-down compared to the ads. It is not a standard "main-character-in-jeopardy" thriller, either. There is one plot twist which seemed unlikely to me, but I can't think how they could have fixed it without major re-writes, and it wasn't major enough to get in the way of my enjoying the movie. The pacing is good, though it demands a few leaps of intuition on some of the characters' parts (rather than slower periods of discovery). Most of the pleasure I got from this movie was from the many twists, most of which I had not guessed beforehand. There were also, though, some nice moments of character interaction not required for what could have been just a taut thriller. I liked the way events and characters were developed in this movie. With the names involved, I was a little afraid of it just being a vehicle, but this movie was a pleasant surprise.
- Sarah Elkins (elkins.wbst139@xerox.com)
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