19. “The Big Bounce” (2004)
A second film version of “The Big Bounce” wasn’t a bad idea, in and of itself. The 1969 film was hardly some unimpeachable classic (see below), the thought of moving the story to Hawaii to add some color wasn’t a bad one and director George Armitage had shown plenty of capacity for this kind of thing in the past, as the man behind “Miami Blues” and “Grosse Pointe Blank.” But given the result, it’s understandable that Armitage has been stuck in director’s jail ever since. Owen Wilson takes the lead role this time around, as Jack Ryan (not that one…), a surfer bum/manual laborer/breaking-and-entering specialist, who’s just served a little time for thwacking the foreman with an aluminum bat. He’s told to leave the island, but comes under the wing of local judge Walter (Morgan Freeman) and the spell of Nancy (Sara Foster), the bonkers mistress of local bigwig Ray (Gary Sinise). All the ingredients are there, but Armitage can’t decide on a tone; it’s equal part crime comedy, easy-going Hawaii postcard and super-broad comedy. Like the original, it’s a bit turgid and aimless (it’s not Leonard’s tightest-plotted novel in the first place), but Armitage lays on an omnipresent, irritatingly jaunty George Clinton score that just plain murders any tension and the film seems so keen to be ingratiating that it forgets to be interesting. It’s also fatally miscast at almost every point: Wilson’s quippy-shtick overwhelms the rest of the picture, Foster (a former model and TV presenter in her acting debut as the femme fatale) couldn’t act if her life depended on it, and the rest of the cast seem to have been assembled entirely at random: Charlie Sheen! Vinnie Jones! Willie Nelson! The film aspires to a certain effortless, but it’s only too obvious on screen how little anyone involved cares about what they’re doing. [D-]
18. “Cat Chaser” (1989)
Leonard was increasingly dissatisfied with screen versions of his work as the 1980s continued (rightly so, as we’ll see), but “Cat Chaser”
must have felt somewhat like the final straw: another bad-tempered
production, another picture re-cut by the studio, and another film that
barely saw a release (it got a theatrical outing in the UK and
elsewhere, but went straight to DVD in the US). Directed by Abel Ferrera (who would bounce back soon after with “King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant“), the film stars the hot-off “Robocop” Peter Weller
as George Moran, an army vet who served in the oft-forgotten 1965
invasion of the Dominican Republic. Returning to Santo Domingo to find
the teenage sniper who saved his life back in the day, he instead
encounters his ex, Mary (Kelly McGillis, who had such an awful
time time making the film with Ferrera that she essentially left the
spotlight altogether), who’s now unhappily married to a psychotic former
general. She plans to leave her husband with a $2 million settlement,
even as another military buddy of George and an ex-cop (Frederic Forrest and Charles Durning) scheme to rip him off, but the general won’t let her
go either. In theory, it should be crackling stuff and what Ferrera
does pull off is the atmosphere; there’s a sticky, sweaty sensuality to
the film that suits the film’s sensibilities nicely. But the trouble is
that Ferrera seems to only prick up his interest when there’s sex
involved — grubby, misogynistic sex at that — and at every other
point, he seems to have simply pointed a camera at the actors and let
them at it. While the studio did cut Ferrera’s film nearly in half
by the time it was released, even then, it’s hard to imagine that
there’s some hidden masterpiece of a cut out there. The film is languid
as it is, so while Ferrera’s ideal version might actually make sense in a
way that the released version doesn’t, it’s unlikely to be any more
involving. [D–]
17. “The Rosary Murders” (1987)
A rare screenwriter-for-hire gig for Leonard, “The Rosary Murders” was pretty much done as a favor. Robert Laurel, a fellow Detroit native, had picked up the rights to one of William X. Kienzle‘s novels featuring Catholic priest/detective Father Robert Koesler, was looking for someone to add some local flavor, and who better than its most famous crime-writing son? Yet the film turned out to be a pretty poor match. The picture’s a fairly conventional thriller, top-lining Donald Sutherland as Father Koesler, who vows to track down the killer of priests and nuns, but finds himself caught between the right thing and his vows when the killer comes to confession. It’s a decent set-up (reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “I Confess“), but despite some vaguely interesting inner-church intrigue (Kienzle himself was a priest who left the church in protest of their attitude towards divorce), the film doesn’t do much with it. It’s a dull thriller with some slightly creaky production values, which for the most part feels like the pilot to some USA Network show. Sutherland is typically good value in the lead, as is Leonard vet Charles Durning as Koesler’s conservative nemesis (the actor reportedly apologized to the writer on set for his participation in “Stick“). So something of a washout, but it’s hard to treat it as a true Leonard movie: by the writer’s account, he took the job for the money, and was mostly rewritten by the film’s director, Fred Walton (“When A Stranger Calls“). If you do watch it, it’s worth keeping an eye out for a cameo from a young Jack White as an altar boy. [D]