It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Urbane art expert Tom Ripley (John Malkovich) is in Berlin selling forgeries with British thug Reeves (Ray Winstone). He kills a man and promptly steals the money and the art. He gives the money to Reeves and ends their relationship. He lives in an Italian villa with his girlfriend Luisa. He meets locals Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott) and his wife Sarah (Lena Headey). Reeves shows up with a job for an outsider to kill a rival. Ripley is not interested until he discovers that Jonathan is dying. He sees an opportunity to play a game.Malkovich is good as the creepy snakelike cold-hearted criminal. The movie could use some better style. It's a great psychological thriller. The visual needs to be more intense. There are some good work from Winstone and Dougray Scott. However the production looks more like a TV movie although it's a well-made Masterpiece Theatre TV movie. The movie should be terrifying but it feels slightly tired. I have to put it down to the director.

Any profound film, book, poem, reveals its essence in its paradox. Ripley's Game is no different. It is a paradox that plays out under the guise of an ordinary film. To this end, it is a film that is enveloped by its own protagonist-antagonist, the paradox of Tom Ripley, a Veneto-dwelling American, seemingly devoid of morals and feeling, yet with all the sensualism and erudition of an epicurean sybarite.Morricone's music, as impeccable as ever, opens the film in Berlin with a slow subtle score before embarking on the clavicembalo (harpsichord) and a beautiful aerial shot of Malkovich's little red fiat coursing through the hills of Treviso.Ripley's Game, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel about the amoral Tom Ripley and his exploits, is a fantastically underrated film which, due to its high-art European status (it was shot on location in Germany and Italy and concerns itself with art first and foremost), was largely passed over in favour of more exciting, and faster moving films. It was a huge financial flop (costing over $30m and recouping barely a tenth of that), and in spite of opening on the big screen in Europe, went straight to DVD in the states.The locations, notably Berlin and the Veneto, are part of the film's charms (dare I say characters in themselves) along with those of the triumvirate of Ripley (Malkovich), Reeves (Winstone), and Trevanny (Scott). The casting is marvellous here, and the three protagonists play off each other's strengths and weakness beautifully. From the very off, the uncouth philistine, Reeves (stoned and waxing as lyrically as he can of Berlin's architecture) aside the Renaissance man Ripley (calm and collected and slightly disgusted at Reeves' crassness), is an absolute joy to watch in its theatricality and Cavani's direction as they walk across the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin's Mitte district with a view to pulling off a not-so-ambitious art heist.It's almost as fine a scene as one a little later where Winstone's character presents Ripley with a garrotte as they walk across another of Berlin's platz's. Here, we see Malkovich living up to his philosophy as he toys with the garrotte in plain sight as if it were a scarf. 'I don't worry about being caught' he says later on in a remarkable scene in a train station bathroom, 'because I don't believe anyone is watching.' It is this total lack of paranoia which manifests itself as a detached coolness, almost palpably terrible in its calmness, that Malkovich (avowedly a man that has never felt embarrassed) carries off so well in his quiet unruffled countenance. Of all the actors who have played Ripley in their various incarnations - Delon, Damon, Hopper, Pepper - Malkovich is by far the one whom Highsmith herself would have recommended for the role. Indeed, one wonders if it is Malkovich playing Ripley or Ripley playing Malkovich such is the quiet strength of his performance.The plot, though itself flawed, struggles a little here and there to tie (garrotte) things up, and leaves a couple of holes (emphatically, not made by bullets) here and there. But it is the plot's unconventionality, garrottes and pokers instead of guns, philosophy instead of mathematics, art instead of science, that makes the film so wonderfully watchable. It is certainly a film that, perhaps like Ripley should he ever get collared, deserves a fair trial.Ripley at one point calls himself a 'creation' and 'a gifted improviser' when Trevanny asks him who he is. Trevanny doesn't seem to understand. He has never dreamed, never improvised, he seems completely lacking in any spontaneity to the point of pathology. Perhaps this is what leukemia does to you (Trevanny we quickly learn is dying, which explains his succumbing to Ripley's outlandish deal), but perhaps not. The final scene has Trevanny in a moment of what can only be called total spontaneity, doing (or more significantly being) something that Ripley cannot himself understand. For a brief moment, and it shows on the lips of Trevanny, the roles have been switched. The master has become the protégé, the protégé become the master. It is a turnaround of some aplomb, as the circle closes and completes itself.Trevanny's name itself seems to have inspired (or have been inspired by - the timeline is a little muddy here) the airport paperback writer and American film scholar Rodney William Whitaker whose later book and bestseller Shibumi (1979) appears under the pseudonym Trevanian and has all the hallmarks of Ripley's presence, as the following quote illustrates: "Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanour, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is…. How does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that…" It appears that Highsmith's Ripley had cause to inspire. 'All I know is that we're in a constant state of being born.' In this disclosure of Ripley's, again in the bathroom (is not the bathroom the place of revelations?), he perhaps divulges his own bodhisattva nature, not quite Buddha yet (whose birth has by his very (un)nature finished), but on the path. He doesn't quite know why he is helping Trevanny in the farcical train scene, but perhaps this is why: to lead Trevanny to his own awakening. This eventually accomplished, (nirvana comes to most at the point of death), Ripley can return to the music, to the clavicembalo which his mistress caresses so gently, and to the art of living which characterizes the one who has achieved what Whitaker later calls Shibumi. Yet, the question remains, and here is the paradox - that within Ripley's understanding and supposed enlightenment there is an obscurity. There is a darkness, and the angst of still being constantly born.

Tom Ripley, the international man of many identities and numerous con games, is back for another round of cat and mouse. Ripley combines the sociopathic tendencies of Anton Chigurh of "No Country for Old Men, the cultured aspects of Hannibal Lector of "Silence of the Lambs" with the savvy and shrewdness of a con-artist like Gondorf of "the Sting" (played by Paul Neuman). But unlike Chigurh, Gondorf and Lector, Ripley plays at even higher stakes espionage often at an international poker game where losing hands mean destruction. Being able to bluff means survival. He defrauds antiques and art dealers. Infiltrates the highest levels of society. And he cons people into believing he is something he is not. While he has the intelligence of a trained assassin he can also identify genuine and fake artworks.In the current story, Ripley is middle-age and living well in a beautiful villa near a small medieval/renaissance-like town in Italy. He has the best taste in art and cuisine. He lavishes his Italian female companion with endless kisses and authentic Baroque-period harpsichords. She seems to know what he does and accepts him and his unconventional behavior. She seems detached from all that he does.One of his former art scam partners, Reeves Minot, arrives one day to his villa, inviting himself to brunch. He's opened up some clubs and a restaurant in Berlin, probably as a front for drug-dealing. He explains that some "neighbors" have become competitors in his racket and he is soliciting Ripley's help to "de-regulate them" for a fee of $50,000. Reeves doesn't want to carry out the deeds himself because it would be too obvious to the authorities as to who probably eliminated his competitors. Ripley initially refuses also fearing it would be too obvious to the police, given his former connection to Reeves. Ripley then suggests that an innocent, someone who has never before played "the game" might be the perfect choice for the job. The authorities might never suspect someone who was completely unconnected in the realm of the underworld.Ripley then suggests a British art framer, Jonathan Trevvany, whom Ripley had previously visited at a social occasion in which he was inadvertently insulted. The art framer has several weaknesses which might entice him into the "game". He has never played, he makes little money from his work and can barely support his family, and he is dying of leukemia. In short, he has almost nothing to lose. The money could help his family after he's gone, and the authorities would most likely never suspect a poor framer whose days are numbered.Reeves begins to solicit Trevvany, playing hard-sell. He even agrees to pay the cost for special tests and possible treatment with a leukemia specialist in Berlin. Trevvany eventually agrees and is pulled into the game. At first he believes that Reeves is the only one he knows who is involved. He regards Ripley as only an acquaintance in the Italian town. But then he discovers Ripley's "other life", unexpectedly.A fun-filled, dazzling, and no-hold's bar mystery-thriller. Ripley stories are essentially cerebral thrillers, a thinking-man's answer to characters like Anton Chigurh and the Terminator. Certainly blood is spilled and innocents die, but all under the watchful gaze of renaissance frescoes and statues. Ripley even knows the best places to acquire high-quality meat and wine. And he is gourmet cook in his own right. I think the main idea behind Ripley is to entertain. I don't believe there is any underlying meaning or theme in these stories, just Ripley and his very unique brand of crime, like a fine Merlot, 1996.

According to IMDb, 'Ripley's Game' cost about $30 million to make. I suppose it helped a few people. John Malkovich, perhaps the most narcissistic, look-at-me actor ever to strike gold in Hollywood, presumably earned a million or two. What we have here is yet another example of the overpaid watched by the underemployed while millions or billions remain undernourished throughout this overcrowded, callous, corrupt, ill-governed world.The plot is stupid beyond belief, and the way it unfolds is also stupid beyond belief. The plot is so stupid that I'd be stupid to summarise it, and any readers would be stupid if they read my distillation of all the stupidities.Why, while living in a world where millions of infants die every year from preventable causes, do people make and watch nonsense like 'Ripley's Game'? Surely time and money could be put to a better use.I thought that Patricia Highsmith, the authorial creator of Ripley, is regarded as a writer of some talent. If the film is even loosely faithful to her novel, the world would be a better place if her books were pulped. I can't help repeating the word: stupid, stupid, stupid.Everyone who is listed on the credits, which run to the usual hundreds, should be ashamed. The only saving grace of this terrible film is the seductive European, mainly Italian, locations. Give me a plodding travel documentary any time.What's the stupidest of a rich choice of stupid scenes? Perhaps the events in the German train toilet, where three garroted corpses (one of which returns to life soon after, wearing a stupid bandage on his ear to indicate that he was the guy almost killed by a wire round his throat) and two assassins comfortably fit into the toilet.I could take a week to list a small fraction of the stupidities in 'Ripley's Game'. I was stupid to view it from start to finish. I'm being stupid to waste more time on this IMDb review. Nobody will read this before they see the film. Anybody who reads this after seeing the film is stupidly adding to the time they have already wasted in its observance.There was a word in the back of my mind that might usefully provide the most concise of summaries. What was it? I remember - STUPID.