Yes, Harvey Keitel is in this. Yes, he gets naked.
Yes, Emmanuelle Beart is in this. Yes, she gets naked.
Yes, this is a European production of an American crime drama. Yes, it sucks.
A Crime attempts to weld together a U-S style psychological thriller, complete with a couple of "big" twists that anyone can see coming, with a existentialist examination of love and obsession right out of French cinema. Maybe that's not such a bad idea but this movie is the worst of all possible worlds. It's as boring and pretentious as any art house Euro flick while also being as vacuous and preposterous as any other piece of crap that gets cobbled together in the States. As a general rule, I try to watch a movie straight through no matter how bad it is. It's the best way to capture the full effect and it's only fair to the folks who made it. Every so often, though, I run into a motion picture where I can't stand it. I have to stop the film at some point, get up out of my chair and shake off the despair and ennui. A Crime is one of those movies.
Vincent Harris (Norman Reedus) is a man whose wife was murdered 3 years ago and the only lead is the taxi he saw leaving their home, a gash in the side and the driver wearing a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Now, Vincent lives in a Brooklyn apartment and races his pet greyhound that never wins. Alice Parker (Emmanuelle Beart) is Vincent's neighbor, a frequent drunk who's desperately in love with him. Or at least some desperate approximation of what she thinks love is. Vincent is fixated on finding his wife's killer. We know that because Alice and a police detective (Joe Grifasi) specifically describe Vincent in those terms. For his part, Vincent doesn't do anything to justify that description until the film is almost halfway over and then he doesn't appear to be fixated. He acts like he's utterly off his rocker, but I guess the filmmakers realized they had to do something to demonstrate Vincent's alleged obsession or the 2nd half of the movie would make no sense at all.
Convinced that Vincent will never be her's until he locates his wife's murderer, Alice heads out and seduces a cabbie named Roger Culkin (Harvey Keitel). She beds him, gets him to fall off the AA wagon, puts a gash in the side of his cab and has him don a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Then she pushes Roger and Vincent together and bingo!
So, to sum up, at this point in A Crime, we've got a pathetic wretch who manipulates a crazy guy into killing another guy who has a headband and a boomerang. Oh, yeah. I forgot that Roger Culkin has a headband and a boomerang. It wouldn't normally be a big deal but those two things pretty much define his entire character.
It turns out that Alice's scheme works and she and Vincent wind up in each other's arms. Then Roger resurfaces and although I sorely hoped that he was a ghost or Alice's hallucination, he's real and his brush with death turned him into some sort of taxi cab supercriminal who exists outside the law. He demands Alice run away with him or he'll turn Vincent in as an attempted murderer. But then it turns out that Roger was the guy who killed Vincent's wife after all and Alice slays him after Roger suddenly turns into the dumbest man alive. Vincent and Alice reunite, only for Vincent to discover what Alice had done, and they both lived happily ever after. Or at least that's what I got out of the ending.
There's a frickin' cornucopia of things wrong with A Crime. It's slow. It has no energy or rhythm. Vincent and Alice are barely two dimensional. It's too long. Both of the twists involving Roger can be seen coming a mile away. It's too quiet. The success of Alice's scheme is so improbable that I at first thought it was evidence that the film's POV had shifted to her delusional perspective. Too much time is spent on Alice and Roger's contrived bar conversations. A headband and a boomerang!
What A Crime smells like is some arrogant Euro effort to class up an American genre flick that founders on a poor grasp of genre mechanics and a lack of interest in any of the characters as human beings. It is dreary and dreadful and if you can view the whole thing in a single sitting, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. For all us lesser folk, skip this loser.
Yes, Emmanuelle Beart is in this. Yes, she gets naked.
Yes, this is a European production of an American crime drama. Yes, it sucks.
A Crime attempts to weld together a U-S style psychological thriller, complete with a couple of "big" twists that anyone can see coming, with a existentialist examination of love and obsession right out of French cinema. Maybe that's not such a bad idea but this movie is the worst of all possible worlds. It's as boring and pretentious as any art house Euro flick while also being as vacuous and preposterous as any other piece of crap that gets cobbled together in the States. As a general rule, I try to watch a movie straight through no matter how bad it is. It's the best way to capture the full effect and it's only fair to the folks who made it. Every so often, though, I run into a motion picture where I can't stand it. I have to stop the film at some point, get up out of my chair and shake off the despair and ennui. A Crime is one of those movies.
Vincent Harris (Norman Reedus) is a man whose wife was murdered 3 years ago and the only lead is the taxi he saw leaving their home, a gash in the side and the driver wearing a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Now, Vincent lives in a Brooklyn apartment and races his pet greyhound that never wins. Alice Parker (Emmanuelle Beart) is Vincent's neighbor, a frequent drunk who's desperately in love with him. Or at least some desperate approximation of what she thinks love is. Vincent is fixated on finding his wife's killer. We know that because Alice and a police detective (Joe Grifasi) specifically describe Vincent in those terms. For his part, Vincent doesn't do anything to justify that description until the film is almost halfway over and then he doesn't appear to be fixated. He acts like he's utterly off his rocker, but I guess the filmmakers realized they had to do something to demonstrate Vincent's alleged obsession or the 2nd half of the movie would make no sense at all.
Convinced that Vincent will never be her's until he locates his wife's murderer, Alice heads out and seduces a cabbie named Roger Culkin (Harvey Keitel). She beds him, gets him to fall off the AA wagon, puts a gash in the side of his cab and has him don a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Then she pushes Roger and Vincent together and bingo!
So, to sum up, at this point in A Crime, we've got a pathetic wretch who manipulates a crazy guy into killing another guy who has a headband and a boomerang. Oh, yeah. I forgot that Roger Culkin has a headband and a boomerang. It wouldn't normally be a big deal but those two things pretty much define his entire character.
It turns out that Alice's scheme works and she and Vincent wind up in each other's arms. Then Roger resurfaces and although I sorely hoped that he was a ghost or Alice's hallucination, he's real and his brush with death turned him into some sort of taxi cab supercriminal who exists outside the law. He demands Alice run away with him or he'll turn Vincent in as an attempted murderer. But then it turns out that Roger was the guy who killed Vincent's wife after all and Alice slays him after Roger suddenly turns into the dumbest man alive. Vincent and Alice reunite, only for Vincent to discover what Alice had done, and they both lived happily ever after. Or at least that's what I got out of the ending.
There's a frickin' cornucopia of things wrong with A Crime. It's slow. It has no energy or rhythm. Vincent and Alice are barely two dimensional. It's too long. Both of the twists involving Roger can be seen coming a mile away. It's too quiet. The success of Alice's scheme is so improbable that I at first thought it was evidence that the film's POV had shifted to her delusional perspective. Too much time is spent on Alice and Roger's contrived bar conversations. A headband and a boomerang!
What A Crime smells like is some arrogant Euro effort to class up an American genre flick that founders on a poor grasp of genre mechanics and a lack of interest in any of the characters as human beings. It is dreary and dreadful and if you can view the whole thing in a single sitting, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. For all us lesser folk, skip this loser.