Femme Fatale

Stars:
Plot Holes:

As a child, I stuck my hand in a flame, learned it burned, and never tried it again. I once banged my head on the wall, discovered it hurt, and never tried it again. So why, oh why, do I subject myself to a Brian DePalma film every five or ten years, hoping that maybe he doesn't still suck? I should know better by now.

He's given up on being an ersatz Hitchcock, and is now trying to create ersatz artsy French films. Three quarters of the first hour is in French, with subtitles. When watching a foreign movie, I prefer subtitles over dubbing, but in an American film it's just one more way for Brian to annoy us.

DePalma does something I've never seen done before: he manages to make a lesbian sex scene boring. It's part of a robbery that goes bad. The heroine escapes the scene with the loot, and has to evade her partners, who want their share. She escapes through a serious of ridiculous, impossible lucky accidents that give new meaning to Dues Ex Machina.

Antonio Banderas stars as the hunk. Of wood. He displays all the charisma of a 2x4. His only purpose in this movie seems to be to make Rebacca Romijin-Stamous' lousy acting look good by comparson.

Half way into the movie I checked the time on my DVD player. It said I had wasted nearly an hour of my life, and would have to waste nearly another hour to finish this thing. I declined. Any director/writer who can't make an audience care about his characters or story in an hour should find another line of work. I didn't think the film could get more pathetic, but then someone told me how it ended. I was wrong.

Ten years ago I worked with someone who got free passes to premiers. Enough passes were given away to fill a theater, and the movie was shown a few days before the official release in order to create a buzz that would sell tickets the first weekend. One show we saw was Raising Cain, another DePalma stinker. On the way out of the theater we heard a woman tell her husband, "We can never, ever, go to a free movie again!" It was that bad. And so is this one. You should never, ever, watch a DePalma movie again, even if it's free.