A hard-boiled man about town meets a sultry beauty in a white dress at a bar. No, it's not Body Heat, it's 1994's China Moon starring Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, and Benicio Del Toro. It's an engaging enough exercise in the genre until the final act just kind of fizzles out.
Harris and Del Toro play cops, Kyle and Lamar, respectively. Kyle's the elder of the two and is showing the ropes to young Lamar. After Kyle has his fateful meeting with Rachel (Stowe), the sultry dame, he and Lamar find themselves at her home after responding to her emergency calls. It turns out her husband, played by Charles Dance with a ridiculous American accent, physically abuses her. One thing leads to another, and Kyle and Madeleine start talking about murder, just like the leads in Body Heat and Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Osessione . . .
China Moon comes up with it's own twist which, without giving it away, amounts to saying maybe things aren't as exciting as you think. Madeleine Stowe and Ed Harris, in any case, may have been miscast or misdirected. They're both solid, all the time. There's not enough heat and anxiety. They generally seem very calm, particularly Harris. Which is kind of interesting. I guess he was playing a guy too experienced to break easily under questioning but there needed to be something ramping up tension in his scenes.
The cinematography is certainly no help. The movie has a lot of outdoor night scenes and no matter where the characters are, whether in a quarry, the middle of a lake, or the woods, everything is lit by floodlights. At the end of the movie, I finally felt like the screenplay was just starting to get to a point and then the movie ended. So I guess that's it then.
China Moon is available on The Criterion Channel.
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