Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Jeff Wells over at MoviePoopShoot was ranting about this one last week, and I hate hearing about films that are finished and just lingering on the release vine, unscheduled, especially when we’re stuck in the middle of the spring drought.
Of course, the question remains: is the film any good? Here’s what one reader had to say about it...
Greetings Harry,
I managed to catch a screening of a finished print of "Ripley's Game" tonight at the legendary Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA and thought I'd send in a review.
I've never read any of the Ripley novels, but I've seen Anthony Minghella's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and thought it one of the better films of 1999. "Ripley's Game" is nowhere near as good. It's not that it's a bad film, it's a perfectly decent little thriller with some very nice performances by John Malkovich and Dougray Scott, but it lacks most of the style and polish of its predecessor.
The setup is this: it's 20 years after the first movie, and Ripley (Malkovich) has established a nice little life for himself; he has an enormous villa in Italy, a lovely piano-playing wife (the charming and beautiful Chiara Caselli) and seems to be dividing his time between mucking around the house with the wife and conducting underground art deals in Berlin. On the way home one day he's invited to a cocktail party by neighbor Jonathan Trevanny (Scott); he goes to the party and walks in on Trevanny making insulting comments about Ripley's lack of artistic taste.
Ripley is later paid a visit by occasional hooligan business partner Reeves (Ray Winstone), who's come with a proposition. He's offering Ripley $50,000 to kill a gangster in Berlin; he needs someone who isn't involved in the Berlin crime scene to do it. Ripley declines, but looking for revenge he later calls up Reeves and suggests he contact Trevanny, who's terminally ill with leukemia and has very little money and a wife (Lena Headey) and son to take care of. Trevanny eventually agrees, after Ripley pays Reeves to increase the offer to $100,000 and Reeves throws in a consultation with a cancer specialist in Berlin. Trevanny does the job, gets his money but in the process gets embroiled in a mob war which results in a lot more bloodshed by the end of the movie.
John Malkovich plays Ripley as a very cold, cynical man, in stark contrast to the sobbing emotional rages of Matt Damon's younger character; for some reason it reminded me of his character from Con Air. He's very effective, though it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for him; there's not a lot of range or emotion required, and his high-pitched monotonal voice and plain, unchanging face make him fit the character pretty well without any work at all. But he handles the subtle moments of tension and panic quite well.
Dougray Scott does an excellent job as Trevanny, capturing very well his transition from hopeless father to reluctant killer. His face really appears to get more and more wracked with guilt as the movie goes on, he hits the numerous emotional highs perfectly and in some of the later scenes between he and Ripley we can really tell the difference between these two men, the killer with conscience and the killer with none; his and Malkovich's performances seem to feed off of each other at times, and each makes the other one better.
Ray Winstone gets a limited amount of screen time but is extremely effective when he's on; it's pretty much the standard Ray Winstone thug character we've seen in numerous other movies with a hint of fear and insecurity thrown in. Chiara Casselli is barely on screen at all and doesn't have much to do when she is, but draws your attention anyway on looks alone. Lena Headey is competent in the standard wife-suspicous-of-husband's-underground-dealings role.
But beyond the acting this movie doesn't have a whole lot to offer. Earlier complaints of the film being too long seem to have been eliminated, the pacing feels fine and the film never really seems to drag on, but there's not much to look at. Aside from a few clever shots the cinematography is quite bland, and the film never seems to make much use of its environment; there's none of the delicious Italian city eye candy of the first film, indeed aside from the architecture this could easily be England or even Connecticut. The colors are drab, the sets are dull, there's a sort of sparseness and cheapness that makes it look almost like a TV movie.
The soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, who has in the past brought us such memorable delights as "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" (and more recently "The Legend of 1900", a mediocre film with a stellar piano soundtrack) is pretty awful. I thought at first that it might still be temporary music but this was clearly a finished print and the score matched the songs the characters were playing on the piano in some scenes. It's another place where this feels like a TV movie, the music is very sparse with lots of single-note melodies and cacophanies; it sets the mood but is quite forgettable otherwise.
The script was also so-so, and in spite of the actors' performances a lot of the story still seemed rather weak; the relationship between Trevanny and his family never seemed that convincing, nor did that between Ripley and his wife, and there were several places where we had a hard time understanding characters' motivations for doing things. Ripley kills without remorse, but unlike Hannibal Lecter he doesn't have much emotion the rest of the time either; we don't get the sense that there's much of a personality there, which makes him not very entertaining to watch. The plot is interesting, though, with a couple of unusual twists.
So overall, this is maybe worth seeing in a theatre if you're a big Ripley or Malkovich fan, but otherwise I'd recommend saving it for an airplane or a rental or wait until some cable network starts showing it 3 times a day.
If you use this you can call me "Douzi" (in tribute to the late great Leslie Cheung).
Thanks, Douzi. I’m a pretty massive fan of Highsmith’s original RIPLEY novels, and I love the ways the character has been interpreted on film over the years. I’ll just throw on THE AMERICAN FRIEND (an earlier film of this same story) and wait for Fine Line to get it together and put this one out.
"Moriarty" out.
