Angle mort

This is a "sleeper," an intense and involving thriller that grabs you from the start....but a film not people know about. Hey, only 10 people have even reviewed it here and the film is 13 years old.

To be fair, I did think the finish was unrealistic which the typical killer-talks- instead-of shoots mentality, a familiar flaw in flimmaking. Too bad, because the rest of the movie is very good with Rutger Hauer a convincing evil blackmailer. Few actors play a psycho better than Hauer (see "The Hitcher" and "Nighthawks").

Rebecca DeMornay is a sexy woman in this film while her husband is the sleazy Ron Silver, but the latter's character is better than most the villains he usually portrays. This movie also has the unusual distinction of being a modern-day crime film with very little profanity.

This is the story of a couple who own a furniture business. Heading home from surveying the future site of their plant in Mexico, they hit a Mexican policeman. Since neither look forward to the rumors surrounding life in Mexican prisons, they decide to quietly head back to California. In other words, they're guilty of hit and run. Thinking they're safe, and admitting the events only to their lawyer, they are suddenly greeted by a stranger who also claims to have arrived from Mexico (Rutger Hauer). The couple believe that he is a witness to their crime and want nothing more than to either get rid of him fast, or keep him quiet with bribes, never trying to let on too much that they know what he's referring to with the numerous hints he drops. But, the stranger has an upper hand in the situation that the couple never accounted for.

I would be reluctant to compare this film, as other viewers have, to Unlawful Entry because of one major difference: the couple themselves were guilty of a crime (to an extent) whereas the couple in Unlawful Entry had actually committed no crime that caused them to be pursued by their crazed assailant. All three main characters in Blindside (Ron Silver and Rebecca DeMornay, who play husband and wife, and Rutger Hauer, who plays the suspicious stranger) are all working around a strategy and a motive because, as is soon revealed to them all, both the couple and their exceedingly weird stranger have good reason for suspicion. The plot, too, is not immediately predictable from beginning to end as it is in Unlawful Entry, but rather, saves most of its crucial mystery until the latter part of the film when the couple must decide how to rid themselves of the stranger. Because the couple are also tainted by their hand in a crime, you are not immediately sympathetic of them, but you may also be initially suspicious upon Hauer's arrival. And, once his true motives are revealed and the crime's events finally given a clear picture, you're strategy changes as well with regards to the characters. It was done rather well.

Asside from Rutger Hauer's incredible weirdness (the synopsis on the box mentioning "bizarre sexual habits," the least of which actually contribute to his creepiness), this made-for-TV thriller may be worth renting. You can at least count on a decent cast as well as a nice constructed story that borders on the hitchcockesque kind of finale.

I commend anyone that was involved with the making of this movie, I am a big fan of thriller movies and this one tops the lot, Also go to see one of my favourit actors (Rutger Hauer) play one of his nastiest roles ever, And there has been alot of those roles for him. I dident even blink an eye while watching this movie. Well done to all involved in this film.

10 out of 10.

As a devotee of sleazy 90s thrillers, I ought to have liked "Blind Side" a lot more than I did. Rutger Hauer reprises his "Hitcher" persona, stalking an immoral yuppie couple after they flee a hit and run in Mexico. Hauer's scenery chewing excess is certainly the main attraction, but his character makes no sense. He's somehow both an evil genius and incredibly easy to manipulate, with his aims remaining totally inscrutable throughout the film.

The script is terribly weak, never generating any sense of urgency or threat in an interminable stream of fights, confrontations, aborted seductions and confusing twists. I had serious thriller fatigue by the end. The Brian May score (not *that* Brian May) is all over the place. I was particularly puzzled by the smooth jazz elevator music in the credits. Watch "Unlawful Entry" instead!

Blind Side (1993)

Sometimes in life, good people under trying circumstances make grim decisions that will, no matter how many years trudge by, will never rise to the level of "excusable." In this thriller directed by "Geoff Murphy," two such people are the husband and wife duo played by "Ron Silver" and "Rebecca De Mornay," respectively. (Duh.) Soon enough, their once in a lifetime moral failing comes back to haunt – and taunt – them, with a horrible vengeance.

Traveling north on a deserted road, yet far south of the border, the two small time entrepreneurs on the tail end of a business cum pleasure trip slam headlong into gut wrenching tragedy; more specifically, this dark and foggy night they inadvertently run down a Mexican Policeman, who, for some unknown reason, lurches out of the brush and onto the windshield of their SUV.

Having enough decency to stop and verify the lawman is in fact beyond mortal help, the character of the husband aggressively convinces his wife that sticking around and doing the right thing might result in some serious hard time. Not a pleasant prospect, considering that the wife was behind the wheel at the time of the accident, and newly pregnant, to boot.

After a tense-ridden crossing of the border, slipping under the noses eyes of suspicious Mexican authorities, they return to their once gratifying life of making and selling pricey furniture. Once a shared calling so pleasantly normal, the love-filled duo are forced to cope as best they can (especially the wife) with their newly acquired burden of guilt. Given time, maybe, they expect the guilt will fade to a tolerable level.

Time to heal, regrettably, is cut short.

Enter "Rutger Hauer," an ominous figure who shows up at their residence looking, for of all things, a job. Tall, handsome, and flushed with an understated animal magnetism that slowly morphs into something darker and more expressive, one of the first of many cryptic and troubling things that glide past the smoothly folksy tongue and subtly smirking mouth of the stranger is that he, too, has recently come north from Mexico. And, without coming out and saying it directly, somehow, someway, he knows more about the husband and wife's grim misadventure down south than they could ever have imagined anybody, anywhere ever learning.

Let the enigmatic game of indirect intimidation, foreboding blackmail and life-shattering violence begin.

Sounds like the confection of an appetizing spine-chiller, huh? And it was, mostly.

The rub, as I experienced it, was excessiveness. Trimmed 15, maybe 20 minutes, and instead of the drawn-out drama I sort of enjoyed, I might have been treated to a top-notch taut thriller. Excessive celluloid bred redundancy. If Rutger Hauer had dropped one darksome, telling hint, he done dropped a thousand. His slyness got so overplayed, I nearly screamed at my TV "out with what you know and how you know it!" Also, those two or so beatings he administered to Ron Silver's character diminished in impact with each thrashing. Oh, back and forth their joust of machismo went. Throw in the three isolated confrontations between Rutger Hauer and Rebecca De Mornay, face-offs that held the potential for violence, sex or a combination thereof – and . . . well, you know, if I saw it twice, I didn't need to see a second encore.

So much of a good thing didn't necessarily equate to a consistently good feature. Nor did it have a chance.

Anyway, "Blind Side" ultimately turned out to be a fair to good movie, carried to the finish, barely, by a clever plot line just believable enough, reinforced along the way by stellar acting.

(Besides, it certainly beat the two previous DVD's I had to suffer through courtesy of my monthly subscription: weirdo "Electric Glide in Blue," a movie that must have had some significance when it was released three decades ago, when going against the grain meant a little more than hating all things George Bush, and "Bone Daddy," a murder mystery that coincidentally starred Rutger Hauer, which, unfortunately and puzzlingly, was riddled with an illogically unfolding plot and "Bone-Headed" non sequiturs of dialogue.)