You can see why the Disney company didn't bother to promote this project, but not why it agreed to produce it in the first place. No flash. No dash. No one (the kiss of death in the American marketplace) to identify with and to root for. The "fault," if such must be found, probably lies primarily with the original script by Ross Thomas, a fully credentialed best-selling crime and espionage novelist. In that capacity, he of course works only in words, in plain black-and-white. He plots. He composes dialogue. He doesn't set off explosions. He doesn't crash cars. He doesn't think in terms of visual spectacle. And the storyline in Bad Company to do with a private-sector free-enterprise dirty-tricks outfit, infiltrated by a disgraced and blackmailed CIA man as a double agent, is right up his alley. A very dark alley, very nearly subterranean or (depending on the lighting) subaqueous. And director Damian Harris deserves utmost credit for not attempting to nuzzle it out of Thomas's alley and onto somebody else's frenetic freeway or breakneck racetrack. It glides; it slithers; it slinks. (Or the camera does, anyway.) It never hurries. Most importantly, most foolhardily, it trusts to the moral compass of the spectator, and to his ability to judge character. More bluntly, to his intelligence. There is a kind of noble naiveté about this. But naive or not, it behooves a movie about moral depravity to resist indulgence in any form of artistic depravity. Better naive than hypocritical. Laurence Fishburne and Ellen Barkin, well coached, chip in with performances of almost Bressonian purity, although no one in Bresson has ever rivalled the dressed-for-success trampiness of Barkin or the saurian sangfroid of Fishburne. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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