I love the word "ravish." It's only one step away from "ravage" and just down the block from "pillage." I try to use it every chance I get, as in, "Madeleine Stowe is ravishing. Any normal man would want to ravish her." Actually, even Ray Liotta, the cop, wants to ravish her and he's not at all normal, I hope.
The movie's got everything a thriller ought to have, right out of McKee's textbook. There is a speech praising the villain, the villain holds the hero at bay, a dead body comes back to life, there are several woman-in-jep scenes, the musical score is copied directly from "Halloween", a woman tries to shoot a man with a pistol from which the man has slyly removed the rounds. This doesn't mean it's necessarily badly done. It wouldn't be so familiar if it hadn't been used so many times before, and it wouldn't have been used so many times before if it didn't get the job done.
Until the very end, which is a traditional slam-bang confrontation with Stowe cowering in the background and a frightened cat and a dead plastic-bagged body stuffed in the closet for no particular reason, it's a routine story of a seemingly nice cop, Liotta, who ingratiates himself with a nice middle-class family, Kurt Russel and Stowe. It gradually becomes clear, first to Russell, then to the somewhat slower Stowe, that this guy is a few beers short of a six-pack. First he captures the burglar who broke into Russell's house and gleefully invites Russell to beat hell out of him. Then Liotta begins to suffer from the delusion that Stowe loves and wants him as much as he does her.
Give me a moment to put on my white coat. Hold it. Arm went into the wrong sleeve. Okay. "In clinical psychology we call this 'projection.' 'Projection' is the attribution of unacceptable emotions on to someone else, when in fact the motives are solely yours. You may see 'projection' displayed to better effect by Humphrey Bogart's character in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.' That's all for the moment. Thank you."
Well, it's routine but it has a couple of good things going for it. Liotta's attentions to Stowe, who is, as I said, well worth whatever attention she gets, is both uninvited and unrequited. But Russell isn't that cool. He suspects at first that something is going on between his wife and Liotta. and there are some angry exchanges dealing with this possibility. Compare, Andy Garcia and Nancy Travis in "Internal Affairs," a movie to which this one bears some resemblance. At least the family is not all bourgeois and snuggly. A bit of edge here and there doesn't hurt.
The opening is rather nicely done too. A silent helicopter shot of a taped-off crime scene -- a couple of humdrum cop cars arranged around a body spread eagled in the middle of the road. The camera meanders over the suburban roof tops and picks out one comfortable mission-style home to zero slowly in on a figure in a red swim suit using the aquamarine pool in the back yard. A typical Los Angeles home, nothing too fancy, worth no more than about $120 billion. Nice opening. Well, you know, if it was good enough for Hitchcock in "Psycho", it's certainly good enough for "Unlawful Entry."
That introduction takes only a few minutes but is concisely written too. We learn basically all we need to about this ordinary and ambitious family. We learn they're hard up for money, that Liotta loves his wife but spends too much time working on business deals, that he plays golf, that his wife wants children. None of this is clumsily spelled out in dialog either. We only guess that he enjoys bourgeois golf instead of proletarian bowling because when he investigates a suspicious noise he walks to his golf bag and yanks out a putter. We guess that she wants kids because of the way she treats the family cat, but those are examples of what I mean when I use the term "concisely written."
In the end I felt a little sorry for Liotta's character. True he clobbers anyone he feels like clobbering, he later murders his partner in cold blood and strangles an innocent young woman, and he throws another naked, compliant, young police groupie out of his car, and he peeks in on Stowe and Russell when they are in flagrante dilecto -- but at least he leaves the cat alone. (In these kinds of movies, the cat doesn't usually survive.) And he's not given a cheap excuse for his derangement. His father didn't abuse him when he was a child or anything. He's just plain nuts, but in a pathetic way, an apologetic way, that almost compels you to wish he had been sane. He's a marginal person in every respect -- no girl friends, no home, nothing.
And, full as the film is of clichés, the dynamic between the three principals is still captivating. Few of us are as rich as Kurt Russell is here, but we can all identify with him because he and his wife find Liotta at first interesting, then insinuating, then intrusive, then mad. It raises questions like, "How do you get rid of someone you dislike but who insists on being your friend?"
Kind of interesting.
The movie's got everything a thriller ought to have, right out of McKee's textbook. There is a speech praising the villain, the villain holds the hero at bay, a dead body comes back to life, there are several woman-in-jep scenes, the musical score is copied directly from "Halloween", a woman tries to shoot a man with a pistol from which the man has slyly removed the rounds. This doesn't mean it's necessarily badly done. It wouldn't be so familiar if it hadn't been used so many times before, and it wouldn't have been used so many times before if it didn't get the job done.
Until the very end, which is a traditional slam-bang confrontation with Stowe cowering in the background and a frightened cat and a dead plastic-bagged body stuffed in the closet for no particular reason, it's a routine story of a seemingly nice cop, Liotta, who ingratiates himself with a nice middle-class family, Kurt Russel and Stowe. It gradually becomes clear, first to Russell, then to the somewhat slower Stowe, that this guy is a few beers short of a six-pack. First he captures the burglar who broke into Russell's house and gleefully invites Russell to beat hell out of him. Then Liotta begins to suffer from the delusion that Stowe loves and wants him as much as he does her.
Give me a moment to put on my white coat. Hold it. Arm went into the wrong sleeve. Okay. "In clinical psychology we call this 'projection.' 'Projection' is the attribution of unacceptable emotions on to someone else, when in fact the motives are solely yours. You may see 'projection' displayed to better effect by Humphrey Bogart's character in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.' That's all for the moment. Thank you."
Well, it's routine but it has a couple of good things going for it. Liotta's attentions to Stowe, who is, as I said, well worth whatever attention she gets, is both uninvited and unrequited. But Russell isn't that cool. He suspects at first that something is going on between his wife and Liotta. and there are some angry exchanges dealing with this possibility. Compare, Andy Garcia and Nancy Travis in "Internal Affairs," a movie to which this one bears some resemblance. At least the family is not all bourgeois and snuggly. A bit of edge here and there doesn't hurt.
The opening is rather nicely done too. A silent helicopter shot of a taped-off crime scene -- a couple of humdrum cop cars arranged around a body spread eagled in the middle of the road. The camera meanders over the suburban roof tops and picks out one comfortable mission-style home to zero slowly in on a figure in a red swim suit using the aquamarine pool in the back yard. A typical Los Angeles home, nothing too fancy, worth no more than about $120 billion. Nice opening. Well, you know, if it was good enough for Hitchcock in "Psycho", it's certainly good enough for "Unlawful Entry."
That introduction takes only a few minutes but is concisely written too. We learn basically all we need to about this ordinary and ambitious family. We learn they're hard up for money, that Liotta loves his wife but spends too much time working on business deals, that he plays golf, that his wife wants children. None of this is clumsily spelled out in dialog either. We only guess that he enjoys bourgeois golf instead of proletarian bowling because when he investigates a suspicious noise he walks to his golf bag and yanks out a putter. We guess that she wants kids because of the way she treats the family cat, but those are examples of what I mean when I use the term "concisely written."
In the end I felt a little sorry for Liotta's character. True he clobbers anyone he feels like clobbering, he later murders his partner in cold blood and strangles an innocent young woman, and he throws another naked, compliant, young police groupie out of his car, and he peeks in on Stowe and Russell when they are in flagrante dilecto -- but at least he leaves the cat alone. (In these kinds of movies, the cat doesn't usually survive.) And he's not given a cheap excuse for his derangement. His father didn't abuse him when he was a child or anything. He's just plain nuts, but in a pathetic way, an apologetic way, that almost compels you to wish he had been sane. He's a marginal person in every respect -- no girl friends, no home, nothing.
And, full as the film is of clichés, the dynamic between the three principals is still captivating. Few of us are as rich as Kurt Russell is here, but we can all identify with him because he and his wife find Liotta at first interesting, then insinuating, then intrusive, then mad. It raises questions like, "How do you get rid of someone you dislike but who insists on being your friend?"
Kind of interesting.