Post by ronnierocketago on Apr 18, 2009 6:20:42 GMT
JOHNNY HANDSOME (1989) - ***1/2[/b]
Just a few years ago, nobody wanted anything to do with Mickey Rourke, not even for a goddamn reality TV show. Now after his triumphant THE WRESTLER comeback, he's unleashed a whole parade of new announced projects. Fucking awesome. Anyway the most prominent obviously is the IRON MAN sequel, but I'm more intrigued by director ST. VINCENT by director Walter Hill. Anyway Rourke apparently will play a hitman who returns to his New York borough to finish a botched job. He disguises himself as a priest, and ends up taking the confessions of his intended vicitm. I smell some religious angst, mixed with guns.
But those two had previously worked together in JOHNNY HANDSOME, their would-be film noir throwback that bombed was quite ignored by critics (despite raving two thumbs up from Siskel & Ebert), and is even seen in some quarters as a low point for both Hill and Rourke. But how many have actually seen it, and not just dismissing it simply based off stature and it's current 5.8 verdict at IMDB? Not many I think. Hell I'm noticing a trend here in the last few movies I've reviewed from this to John Frankenheimer's REINDEER GAMES to Michael Cimino's, well most of his stuff, where I ended up enjoying or appreciating them all in varying degrees despite their supposed "bad" reputations.
But not GYMKATA. The Internet was right about that one.
Walter Hill's only only profits in the Reagan Decade were 48 HRS. and RED HEAT, both practically the same fucking buddy cop flick. He's alot like Brian DePalma, whom both their biggest "hits" are arguably among their thematically weakest efforts. Hell Hill even tried to drop his schtick at one point and played to what he thought people wanted with the MTV-influenced decent STREETS OF FIRE, which blew up in his face.
Hill's tragedy was that for a filmmaker that is a student of, and master, of the tough guy action-packed melodrama, he was making some real quality pictures yet he had the shitty luck of nobody seeing them. The gang fantasy actioneer THE WARRIORS (one of my favorite movies) was poised to be a super breakout hit until gang riots in theatrical screenings curtailed that release. THE LONG RIDERS is a strong underrated western gem, and SOUTHERN COMFORT was a slick Vietnam parable, maybe too sly for most people at the time. The "contemporary western" EXTREME PREJUDICE with Nick Nolte was pretty good too. Hell Hill made Ryan O'Neal a badass in THE DRIVER. That's a miracle if you ask me.
So much like them, I quite dug JOHNNY HANDSOME though I'm sure I wouldn't have respected it back in high school. You know that time in your budding cinema vocation when you go annoyingly snarky about any film reusing cliches and stereotypes because you think they're a mark of lazy filmmaking. But now having seen much of the film noirs that HANDSOME sought to emulate, I appreciate it much more for what Hill and Rourke were coming from, and I think they pulled it off for the most part.
It's like that argument I made in my FAST & FURIOUS review, why do people keep recycling certain conventions? Because believe it or not, sometimes they still actually work.[/i]
This is much true here where Rourke plays a New Orleans hood disfigured since birth, and can only speak in gibberish because of his fucked-up mouth, thus he's mockingly nicknamed "Johnny Handsome." It's ironicly hilarious how Rourke here in heavy grotesque make-up looks much like he does now. But the guy is rather intelligent, which is why his old criminal buddy has him draw up the plans in robbing a rare coin shop with other cons Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin. The problem in working with other crooks is obviously that you can't trust them, and Henriksen and Barkin betray/murder the pal, and leave Rourke to take the rap.
Hill has never been accused of subtlety, but I did dig the touch of those robbers (including Rourke) wearing masks during the heist, ironic considering that is what Rourke will be doing in the film's second half. Those robbery masks are hilarious though because they look like the sort of masks kids in Kindergarten would make out of Elmer's glue, crayons, and plastic scissors. Did this gang rob a daycare earlier in the day or something?
While in jail, plastic surgeon Forest Whitaker makes a deal with Rourke to undergo a radical facial reconstruction experiment in exchange for early parole. I liked Hill's detail that this wasn't just all done in one super operation, but within a series of procedures from the mouth to the skull to the nose, and so forth. Also, that Rourke has to partake in a painfully fustrating speech therapy because hey, now folks can understand what the hell he is saying. Whittaker befriends the thug and kinda becomes his cheerleader and defender, and I actually bought this relationship, though does he do this more out of pity or because Rourke was Whitaker's guinea pig? I would say it was a mix of both.
So with a new face and identity, you immediately expect Rourke to hit the streets and get revenge on those assholes that betrayed him, right? Wrong. In fact, he actually goes to work at the dockyards and for the first time in his life, nobody is staring at or ridiculing him. I loved Rourke's performance here, of an isolated guy who's avoided any serious human contact within his entire conscious existence, and now suddenly having to deal with the fact that women actually might find him sexy now. This is no fantasy nonsense of him changing characterization overnight. Take that scene when he confronts an asshole who's bullying his new girlfriend Elizabeth McGovern. This isn't a stylized "cool" fun fight sequence you would expect, but instead Rourke plays it quiet and surprisingly cold-blooded calm, using few words and a shiv to make his point clear. The dude can, and has, killed without much hesitation.
That plays into Morgan Freeman's cop character. We the audience is supposed to despise him character for busting Rourke's balls and seemingly wants him to fail, but I can't blame Freeman. HANDSOME and Rourke plays Mr. Handsome as a victim of fate who is is still none the less a career criminal. His personality hasn't changed, as much as its slightly adjusted to be more human instead of a one-note violent anti-hero like I was expecting from Hill.
Indeed like many film noirs, HANDSOME is a romanticized gritty bare-knuckles morality crisis of a nice-but-also-not-so-nice guy who must choose from doing what he thinks he's ogligated to do in striking blood revenge for someone who probably would have done the same for him, or forsaking all that in favor of a honest job and a woman that loves him more than just for his mug. So in a way HANDSOME is like a modern day American crime plot boiler retake on THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, Vengeance or Life?
But like all such tales, there is a tipping point of no return, success or failure, bang or bust for our protagonist. We see Rourke cashing his measley paycheck when he catches a glimpse of the company's millions of bucks in the accounting room and we go oh shit, and think the dumb bastard is gonna try to take the easy money and run. Nah, he doesn't. Then he heads down and meets up with Henriksen and Barkin (who of course don't recognize him), and you think Rourke will take his new stolen gun and blast holes into them but...you get the pattern here.
Henriksen and Barkin are entertainingly sleazy, with Lance the short-minded knee-jerk prick who lacks any kind of imagination, and Barkin the local bicycle (everyone in town has ridden her) who'll join in bed with anyone she thinks will set her up financially for life. I loved the detail of how rich off that coin shop job, they wasted all their money in buying a shitty strip joint and utterly miserable. That's what you would expect from white trash.
They make HANDSOME even richer once we finally realize what Rourke is scheming: Get those backstabbers to help him steal the dockyards' money, then Rourke at the right juicy moment will screw them and take the cash. But more than anything else, reveal his true identity to them as well. See its not just revenge that Rourke has fantasized over, but dicking it to his perpetrators with ironic justice.
And that is perhaps his downfall, and maybe Freeman wasn't such a dick after all. I had this fear heading into the climax that Rourke and Hill would pussy out and give us the usual generic happy ending, tie up loose ends, routine gunfight or car chase, have people leave the theatre feeling good, all that crap mentality we got in the 1980s. At least like I got with SHAKEDOWN. Instead, Rourke and Hill stuck to their guns with the only true fitting and tragically appropriate ending for such a story, in film noir fashion. I applaud them and those producers at Carolco, who spent part of their RAMBO fortune on HANDSOME, for going along with it.
That perhaps is another reason why REINDEER GAMES lacked the gas for me, because HANDSOME touched a nerve. Plus unlike REINDEER, HANDSOME actually has a solid groovy blues soundtrack composed by Ry Cooder (who also scored Hill's STREETS OF FIRE and THE LONG RIDERS) that gets the thematic job done.
Sorry if I might overhype HANDSOME with this review, but I really got involved and dug how Hill is kicking ass with a totally great cast who either play up what their parts require or sometimes exceeding beyond what such archetypes would normally demand. Hell we even get some good acting scenes between Oscar-winning legendary black American actors in Freeman and Whitaker that otherwise we would have taken for granted. Interestingly, Al Pacino reportedly wanted to do HANDSOME but he dropped out because of as supposedly put it, the movie could never escape its "B-movie origins."
Sure I guess HANDSOME could have escaped its genre origins, but like EXTREME PREJUDICE and Roman Polanski's FRANTIC, I say so what?[/i]
In fact, I hope Hill makes a grand return to the movies with ST. VINCENT like Rourke did with THE WRESTLER. He's already riding a small comeback having shot the pilot for the popular HBO program DEADWOOD, and BROKEN TRAIL, the highest rated TV movie in cable history which won him an Emmy. But I want him to go full circle, and Walter mother fucking Hill back bitches, helming the sort of stories I want to see at the big screen.
You know, instead of goddamn 17 AGAIN.