Mannequin le jour

A waste of time. If you like watching pretty women talking in empty cliches, doing nothing for an hour and a half, this is the movie for you. The most slow-paced and dull and uninteresting film I've seen for years.

Pret a Porter meets Barb Wire in this good-looking but rather tiresome thriller based around the fashion industry. Goldeneye's Famke Janssen is superb (but wasted) as the eponymous heroine, who seeks vengeance after her flatmate is maimed. Yes she is a model by day and an angel of vengeance by night who looks absurd in purple underwear and crash helmet. Great photography but a laughable script, poor Basic Instinct-type interrogation scene and occasional nudity can't save this from the bargain bin. Janssen fans be warned.

Despite the credits proclaiming otherwise, this film was almost certainly written, cast, lit, filmed, scored and edited by a fourteen-year-old boy. No other excuse exists. The crash helmet is the killer costume addition. Sure, it's got eye candy. However, Famke Janssen was just starting to get a foot in Hollywood's door then and can be forgiven. Sean Young, on the other hand, can't. Shannon Tweed has been happily knocking out rubbish like this for ever so there's no change for her. Imagine a really poor pilot episode for some awful new Saturday afternoon series for teens. Then imagine switching on to it when it's halfway through. That's what it's like to watch this from the beginning.

This was shown on the TV last week. Unusual movie, nice to look at, but predictable.

It's easy to call this movie absurd. Well, I suppose it is. But then, so is a plot about a bloke getting dressed up as a bat and fighting another bloke dressed up as a penguin. (Not that I'm drawing any kind of comparison with the Batman movies. But therein lies the inspiration, I think).

"Model By Day" is not a very good movie: it's clumsily directed, poorly scripted (who could the "mystery opponent" be? Hmmm, look at the cast), the editing is a disaster, roughly 70% of the action appears to have been performed by stunt doubles, and the cinematography is annoyingly soft-focus. What it does offer, however, is Famke Janssen, one of the sexiest actresses alive in my opinion, in a leather outfit and butt-kicking mode. This movie was made one year before "Goldeneye", and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the people who picked her for the role of Xenia Onatopp had seen her here first: those eyes...those legs...that attitude...and ESPECIALLY that biting of her lower lip that she does so often...watch this movie if only to see her. It also probably served as an inspiration for "Black Scorpion" from 1995 and the subsequent TV series of the same name. (**)