Review of Femme Fatale (2002) by Jeremy S — 04 May 2010

This seems like a B-movie. Everything about the cast and packaging screams B-movie. Late-career Banderas, mid-career Romjin-Stamos, ...

And then the first ten minutes of the film are surprisingly gripping and tense, with sparse dialogue that wishes it had been written by David Mamet and a heist that could easily sit in the middle of a mid-range A-list movie.

Unfortunately, once the movie moves past those first ten minutes, everything goes to pots. It stops feeling like one film, and starts feeling like three separate movies, clumsily stuck together with blue tack. Cinematic devices are used without any point at all - in one scene, there is a split screen, and everything seems to suggest that the simultaneity has some sort of tense timeline to it, but no, it gets abandoned without ever having justified its existance. Everything starts being crass and amateurish, not least of which the dialogue. Rebecca Romjin-Stamos proves that she is better as silent entity or covered in blue makeup than au naturel and delivering dialogue - but, to be fair on her, the writing is decidedly rotten.

Is this ever a sizzling cat and mouse game full of sexual tension? No. It's a film that fails to live up to the first few minutes - and, on reflection, about 50% of the credit for the relative quality and tension of those lies in the use of Ravel's Bolero (although the Bolero in the movie is actually not a high quality performance, as it does not start nearly as quietly as it should, nor escalate as gradually as it should).

All in all, Brian DePalma seems to have lost any skills he ever had. This movie is a pitiful effort.