Review of Miami Blues (1990) by Adam M — 10 Mar 2011

It's better after a second viewing, but I wished I had liked this a lot more, after Edgar Wright recommended it. Alec Baldwin gives a great performance as a halfcocked psychopath whose love of life is so strong, mixed up and unscrupulous, he can't help but enjoy breaking fingers, busting jaws, playing cops-and-robbers, shooting people on a gut feeling and answering questions about his preferred vegetables with a pause to think out the words "I don't want to talk about that at this time." The rhythm and humanity of the rest of the movie is not good enough to swing around Baldwin's homicidal urges and primitive faith in carpe diem.

Demme produced this after directing Something Wild, where Ray Liotta's character was a lot like Alec Baldwin's here, although less wild-eyed and tilting at windfalls. But the earlier movie wasn't so relativistic about whether squares, suckers and slobs were living life more fully than a violent hoodlum, and about whether violence is just the law of nature that we've grown too soft and decadent to understand.