Awesome Movie

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Jeff Fahey is a sketch artist working the the LAPD. Drew Barrymore has witnessed someone entering the house of a murder victim and describes the woman's appearance. When Fahey finished his sketch, it looks like his wife, Sean Young. It not only LOOKS like her; it's a virtual PORTRAIT, with vibrant colors, a little beauty spot, and every hair of her wild do in place. This leaves Fahey disturbed.He doesn't confront his wife at first, but his suspicions gradually grow as he discovers for the first time that she was doing some kind of fashion work for the murder victim. It gets a little more intense when he discovers one of her ear rings at the crime scene.Young is very casual about it all. Yes, she was a client of the dead guy but so what? Her ear rings? She lost them somewhere, why? Drew Barrymore turns up a corpse in the LA River, which used to be a nice river before they covered it in concrete and cluttered it up with dead bodies. The LA River Revitalization Corporation is working to turn it from a concrete ditch into an urban oasis. That's fine, as long as they keep the corpses out. In my experience, they've shown themselves to be unresponsive to friendly overtures.In the course of the investigation, Fahey becomes a suspect himself and turns rogue. He spends the film unraveling the clues and the ending comes as rather a surprise.It seems long and plodding at times. The performances are professional but no more than that. The villain has a smooth voice and a face that, if it were a household appliance, would have to be an old-fashioned laundry washboard. The direction is pedestrian.But think of the tangled plot -- poorly executed though it may be. It's classic film noir. If it weren't in color, and if Victor Mature or Glenn Ford or somebody had been the lead, and it had been shot with striking shadows and kick lights, it would be a noir exemplar.

"Jack Whitfield" (Jeff Fahey) is a sketch artist who works for the Los Angeles Police Department and has been instructed to draw the image of a possible murder suspect as described by a witness named "Daisy" (Drew Barrymore). To his horror he then draws a picture of his wife, "Rayanne Whitfield" (Sean Young). Not wanting to implicate her he hurriedly draws another picture of a person he had just met named "Claire" (Stacy Haiduk) and presents it to his boss, "Tonelli" (James Tolkan). A little later Daisy is killed and Jack becomes a murder suspect as well. Now, rather than reveal any more of this film and risk ruining it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that although some scenes were a bit unrealistic I still enjoyed it for the most part. I liked the performance of Jeff Fahey and I thought Sean Young definitely added some heat. All in all then, I rate this movie as slightly above average.

Jeff Fahey has such alert eyes and a smudgy, insidious smile that every character he plays seems villainous; therefore, it doesn't really work to cast him as the good guy of the piece, the audience is just waiting for his character to crack and start blowing people away. Drew Barrymore, fresh off her acclaimed role as "Poison Ivy", must have done this film simply as a favor to director Phedon Papamichael (he was the cinematographer on "Ivy"); playing a character named Daisy Drew (!), she's bumped off right away, which leaves us with no one to look at but Jeff Fahey and Sean Young (who hasn't had a single subtle moment on camera since "Blade Runner"). This witless script, by Michael Angeli, concerns a police sketch artist who draws his own wife's face from a murder witness's testimony, and while that's not a bad idea for a plot, it would be much better suited to an hour-long TV series. This cable-made movie is short on inspiration (beginning with the casting) and shorter on surprises. * from ****

Could have done a better film with this premise. The first two thirds of the movie, where it was much more of a psychological story was much better than the denouement where some small amount of action was attempted. Jeff Fahey's performance was consistently good. It's good to see an actor who doesn't look like such a pretty boy. Sean Young was good at the beginning, but by the end, she had given in to the script.