Comfortable smelly old shoe. A disillusioned investigative reporter and first-person narrator ("There's nothing worse than a writer who doesn't have anything to say. Well, that's me"), a couple of hot dames (one underage: the authoritative Chloe Sevigny), a phoney kidnap scheme, a double-cross, a couple of surprise twists. The serious-minded German director Volker Schlondorff (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Tin Drum, The Handmaid's Tale) has a typically European aesthetic appreciation for the conventions of a Série Noire pulp novel, namely James Hadley Chase's Just Another Sucker. If he had a little less, he would have worried more about the plot logic. As is, the results might have been better if the role of the femme fatale had gone to someone less clueless than Elisabeth Shue, swinging her hips, arching her back, parting her lips (how does this go, again?), a camp vamp. But not enough better to matter. Woody Harrelson, Gina Gershon, Michael Rapaport. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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