ROMEO IS BLEEDING
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Gary Oldman, Lena Olin, Juliette Lewis, Annabella Sciorra, Roy Scheider. Screenplay: Hilary Henkin. Director: Peter Medak.
Sometimes you can learn a lot about a film from its ad campaign. The television spots for ROMEO IS BLEEDING featured a high energy, rapid-edit montage which made the film look like an all-out action thriller; the print ads, on the other hand, featured stylized renderings of the stars in a scene out of a 50's crime comic, with critical blurbs in word balloons. And that about sums up what's wrong with ROMEO IS BLEEDING. There's a fair amount of style and black-humored mayhem, but underneath it is a film that really doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a noir thriller or a parody of a noir thriller, and a script that is an absolute mess.
Gary Oldman stars as Sgt. Jack Grimaldi, a New York cop with a wife (Annabella Sciorra), a mistress (Juliette Lewis) and ethics that are always for rent. Although primarily assigned to watch over organized crime figures preparing to testify against their bosses, his big money comes from one of those bosses, a kingpin named Falcone (Roy Scheider) who pays Jack to reveal where the stool pigeons are roosting. Falcone's latest target is Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), a psychotic "hit person." Mona offers Jack $350,000 *not* to reveal her whereabouts, and to help her stage her death. Jack soon realizes he can't have it both ways, as Falcone and Mona begin closing in from opposite sides.
Stylistically, ROMEO IS BLEEDING seems to be on the right track. Director Peter Medak has two great films about British crime figures to his credit (THE KRAYS and LET HIM HAVE IT), and shows he's studied his American gangster classics. The lighting is evocative, the air is usually thick with cigarette smoke, and trumpets and saxophones wail plaintively in the background. A running voice-over narrative by Jack, told in retrospect and in the third person, achieves the right Raymond Chandler-esque tone of impending doom. The stage is set to have some fun with film noir conventions--the dumb blonde girlfriend, the urbane mob boss--but that's not what happens.
What does happen is that Medak and screenwriter Hilary Henkin decide to serve up a freaked-out combination of 1940s and 1990s crime film sensibilities, sort of a "what if Quentin Tarantino and Abel Ferrara collaborated on a Phillip Marlowe adaptation." Consequently, the tone of ROMEO IS BLEEDING is radically uneven, with moody conversations slamming into blood-spattered confrontations, and characterizations which don't make a shred of sense. The most glaring and gruesome example of this confusion is Lena Olin's Mona, who is part femme fatale and part Terminator. There is no consistency to her actions, as she goes to a macabre extreme to make her feigned death appear real, then kidnaps the man she was supposedly trying to fool, has his henchmen work for her, and then turns herself in to the police. The only logic in ROMEO IS BLEEDING is the logic of excess, as the filmmakers abandon all pretense of telling a story in the name of the outrageous.
Structurally, the script for ROMEO IS BLEEDING is a disaster. One of the key points to the story is that Jack sends his wife away for safety, so that he can meet up with her later. This conversion comes out of nowhere; to that point we had only seen a vague tolerance between them (in a single scene), and nothing to indicate that Jack sincerely loved her. Jack is developed in a careless, haphazzard manner that left me without any concern for what happened to him. Finally, ROMEO IS BLEEDING commits perhaps its most unpardonable sin with a final showdown between Jack and Mona which was so anti-climactic that I groaned out loud. At times, the film seems to have been improvised, as though in the middle of shooting someone would periodically say, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to do this?" ROMEO IS BLEEDING looks good, occasionally very good, and Olin's performance is entertaining, but the film also appears to have been edited with a knife and fork, and amounts to little more than a series of loosely connected scenes with shock value.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 romeos: 4.
-- 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