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I honestly don't understand the low rating. I totally enjoyed this movie. Kathleen Turner and Jay O. Sanders were especially great in this. It has a good story and a decent amount of action scenes. I'd suggest people ignore the low rating and give it a shot for themselves.

In the 1980's Kathleen Turner was a tremendous star. Several of her films were huge box-office hits:"Romancing the Stone"(1984), "Jewel of the Nile"(1986), "Peggy Sue Got Married"(Best Actress Oscar nomination,1986), and "The War of the Roses"(1989). Critics loved her in John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor"(1985) and "The Accidental Tourist"(1987). Her sexy voice helped make "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"(1988) an enormous blockbuster. And who can forget her star-making performance that made her quite the sex-symbol in "Body Heat"(1981). When "V.I. Warshawski" came out Turner was still at her peak. The huge success of "War of the Roses" made her the #1 female star at US BoxOffices in early 1990. But "V.I." opened to disastrous reviews. She is actually very good in it but the script is so mediocre and the direction is so flat. She is given nothing to work with but her vibrant personality and sultry looks keep it together. The film ended up pulling in only 12 million in the US. This disaster immediately derailed Turner's career. Male stars like Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage can star in one flop after another pulling in huge salaries but it does not matter as long as they get an occasional blockbuster. But take a huge Female star like Turner- give her one colossal dud and she is more or less finished in Hollywood. Turner's career never recovered. A few more mediocre duds followed then her looks went so now she is stuck in supporting roles that make it hard to believe she was once among the greatest of female stars. Maybe she can make a comeback as a star character actress. WHo knows.

I'm coming at this as a fan of Kathleen Turner, the V.I. Warshawski series and of my home city of Chicago. This movie simply blew it.

The casting, at least, was perfect. Turner is perfectly cast as V.I. The voice, the look, the attitude, everything. She perfectly captures the character. Even the rest of the casting is good. Jay O. Sanders perfectly fits Murray (A red-headed Elliot Gould according the books) and Dennehy is Bobby Mallory.

The problem is script and direction. They took bits and pieces from at least four different books and threw them together, badly. They watered down V.I. (tho Turner did a hell of a job of working through it). The movie loses its way at the end. It's just a mess. The directing was half-hearted. And they never got much of the character of Chicago, which is a major part of V.I. herself.

This could have been a great movie. V.I. is one of the great unsung female characters in mystery fiction. Chicago is one of the great cities of the world. And the stories in the series are full and complex. And this movie wasn't any of it.

It's good for the hardcore Kathleen Turner fans. She is the best part of this movie and manages to get the character to show through the bad dialog. But this movie could have been so much more. Hopefully a good adaption could be done at some point.

Vicky V.I. Warshawski (Kathleen Turner) is a brassy private investigator in Chicago. She meets ex-hockey player Boom-Boom Grafalk at a bar. She is surprised when he brings his daughter Kat (Angela Goethals) to babysit. Next he's killed in a suspicious accident. V.I. promises Kat to solve her father's death. With the help of reporter Murray (Jay O. Sanders), they investigate the death and the sale of the family dockside property and business.

I like Kathleen Turner as this character. She fits the character quite well and her relationship with little tough-talking Kat is endearing. It's too bad that this is such a badly made movie. The action is done poorly. Director Jeff Kanew does a poor job overall.

"V.I. Warshawski" (Kathleen Turner) is a private detective who is hired by a former hockey player named "Bernard 'Boom Boom' Grafalk" (Stephen Meadows) to investigate some deals involving his two brothers. When her client is murdered she not only inherits the murder case but temporarily gets Bernard's 13 year-old daughter "Kat" (Angela Goethals) as well. Throw in a shady mob figure by the name of "Smeissen" (Wayne Knight), a fatherly cop "Lt. Mallory" (Charles Durning) and a two-timing newspaper journalist named "Murray" (Jay O. Sanders) and what develops is a good action movie with plenty of humor along the way. Now, while this movie certainly has some faults what I liked best about it was the performance of Kathleen Turner who I thought did quite well in spite of some weak dialogue and a couple of rather obvious and predictable scenes. She also had some great legs. In any case, I enjoyed the movie and I rate it as slightly above average.