BAD COMPANY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Ellen Barkin, Frank Langella. Screenplay: Ross Thomas. Director: Damian Harris.
There is a trick to pulling off a neo-noir thriller like BAD COMPANY successfully. Many young filmmakers and screenwriters seem convinced that it's all about mood-drenched cinematography, or a suitably twisty-turny plot. The fact is that while those elements might give a film a healthy start, they can't really make anyone care about what's going on. John Dahl (RED ROCK WEST, THE LAST SEDUCTION) has re-ignited interest in the genre, not simply because he knows how to push the right technical buttons, but because he weds a great story with interesting characters. BAD COMPANY is loaded with double- and triple-crosses, but it's hard to care much because the characters are so flat and bored-looking.
Laurence Fishburne plays Nelson Crowe, a former CIA operative now looking for a job after an agency "downsizing." He goes to work for a private organization known as the Tool Shed, which specializes in doing dirty work like espionage, blackmail and bribery for corporate clients, run by former CIA agents Vic Grimes (Frank Langella) and Margaret Wells (Ellen Barkin). Crowe's first assignment is buying the vote of a state supreme court justice (David Ogden Stiers) on a client's case, but he's not exactly working for the tool shed. Secretly still employed by the CIA, Crowe's job is gathering evidence against the Tool Shed. But he also has plans of his own, chief among them trying to stay alive.
BAD COMPANY is the kind of movie with tech credits so slick that for a while I was tricked into thinking I was watching a good movie. It's a good *looking* movie, to be certain, with great production design by Andrew McAlpine (THE PIANO) and glossy photography of Vancouver locations by Jack N. Green (UNFORGIVEN). Then, gradually, it became clear that BAD COMPANY was all attitude. Everyone walks with maximum swagger, they wear sunglasses everywhere and they engage in threat-filled, under-the-breath conversations through a haze of cigarette smoke. There is also, of course, some steamy sex, and it may be BAD COMPANY's strongest selling point. It's not that the sex is all that spectacular, but it is between Barkin and Fishburne, and it's almost unheard of for a Hollywood movie to include an inter-racial relationship without being *about* the inter-racial relationship.
It's easy to see why a studio would green light this story without fear of controversy, though: Fishburne and Barkin may be black and white, but they're barely human here. Fishburne plays Crowe with a sleepy detachment, trying to play suave but instead coming off as mechanical. Barkin, meanwhile, is even less interesting. She's supposed to be a sexy "Ice Queen," but even a femme fatale needs some sort of personality. A subplot in which Margaret tries to take Grimes out with Crowe's help seems primarily intended to give her something vaguely interesting to do, because as far as I could tell the real story could have taken place just as easily without her. Almost every supporting character is the same, interchangably cool and devious: Michael Beach as a Tool Shed operative; Michael Murphy as Crowe's CIA superior; Daniel Hugh Kelly as a professional card player. In fact, there are so many dispassionate performances in BAD COMPANY that Spalding Gray's turn as the neurotic CEO of the Tool Shed's main client looks like he got the only cup of coffee on the set that day.
The plotting in Ross Thomas' screenplay is reasonably clever, an interesting look at post-Cold War espionage as a growth industry. While there are plot twists aplenty, they never feel piled on, nor did I need a scorecard to keep up with who was screwing over whom. The problem with BAD COMPANY isn't *what* happens, it's to *whom* it happens. It isn't always necessary for characters to be likable, and in a dark thriller it may not even be desirable, but they need to be more than robots whose sole function is moving the plot forward. Laurence Fishburne, Ellen Barkin and company are fine actors, but they couldn't manage to act interested in anything that their characters had to say or do.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 double-crosses: 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