LAST DANCE
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Directed by: Bruce Beresford Rating: ** (Maltin scale)
During the last half century, only one woman has been tried and executed for her crimes. Unfortunately for the producers of LAST DANCE, this capital punishment movie fails to generate enough interest even to raise the question "Is this *that* woman's story?"
Following on from last year's Academy Award nomination for her supporting role in CASINO, Hollywood fave Sharon Stone continues her bid for recognition as a Serious Actor. After a diabolically-dreary turn in DIABOLIQUE, Stone returns to serious cinema in a film that is seriously and uncompromisingly average. As death row inmate Cindy Liggett, Stone--sans makeup and with a Meryl Streep-inspired Southern drawl--plays a convicted killer who has been in the state penitentiary awaiting the death penalty for 12 years. With three stays of execution by a sympathetic judge yet little hope for ultimate mercy, Stone's character is one that is beaten and broken and ready to die.
Enter Rick Hayes (NORTHERN EXPOSURE's Rob Morrow), an inexperienced attorney who is assigned to review Liggett's case for the Clemency Board. Expected to follow standard operating procedure to an inevitable outcome, Hayes instead finds himself drawn into a personal relationship with Liggett as he investigates her crime. Although there is no question that she is guilty--as a teenaged crackhead, Liggett cold-bloodedly beat to death two high schoolers--Hayes discovers a changed woman in Liggett and seeks to have her sentence commuted. Only a compassionate nod from the Governor can save her from death by lethal injection as Hayes fights to uncover discrepancies in her original defense trial.
But this is not a brutal, hard-hitting expose of life behind bars, which might have made for better drama. The worst the women prisoners appear to endure is a steady diet of television soap operas and game shows! LAST DANCE's focus is on the relationship between Liggett and Hayes, and this is where it falls down. These two characters are similar in so much as no one has expected anything of them in life, but otherwise there is simply no chemistry between the two, for which we can blame both the weak script and Morrow's featherweight performance as Hayes. The film lacks emotional punch right up until the climactic scenes, when Stone finally gives it her all in glorious Technicolor.
Word-of-mouth and obvious comparisons to the superior DEAD MAN WALKING should kill LAST DANCE off at the box office. Sharon Stone fans are about the only potential audience and they will be treated to a decent Sharon Stone performance coupled with an atypical, anti-glamorous Sharon Stone look. She certainly does the best she can with the paper-thin material--LAST DANCE is unlikely to hurt her career.
Veteran Australian director Bruce Beresford (BREAKER MORANT) is no stranger to plots centering around civic injustice, but he plays this outing way too safe, failing to inject any life or depth into the proceedings. If there was an opportunity for originality or creativity here then Beresford missed the boat. LAST DANCE fails to satisfy as astute character study, provocative political treatise, or even camp women-in-chains potboiler.
As dances go, this is a slow one-step with no chance of appeal.
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