Her Alibi

Always likable Tom Selleck is well cast as a mediocre mystery writer (VERY mediocre, based on the samples of his writing we get in the voice-over narrations, which are one of the funniest parts of the movie). He's looking for a plot for his next book and finding it in the person of a beautiful Romanian college student (Paulina Porizkova) who seems to be hiding some big secret. The movie plays like the plot of a bad detective book, with perceptions of the female character shifting from dangerous to trustworthy to suspicious and back. The chemistry between the characters works very well romantically as both characters begin to fall in love despite being wary and suspicious of the various goings-on, and the Romanian KGB agents on Paulina's trail make for useful comic villains.

A lot of us go through our quite ordinary lives daydreaming about being these larger than life characters, so I thought that this story about this sheltered and detached mystery writer, Phillip Blackwood, was quite good because of the funny and endearing way it relates to being a dreamer.

I'm a big Tom Selleck fan, since his days as island hopping P.I. Thomas Magnum, and I think he was the perfect fit for the role of Phil Blackwood. Selleck is this tall, good-looking dude who looks the part of your typical hero or action star, but he is able to come across as this almost goofy, nice guy, and I think those are the qualities that make Thomas Magnum and Phillip Blackwood such great characters. The contradictions between the characters' physical appearances and their personalities make them very easy to like and root for.

I liked the rest of the cast too. Paulina Porizkova was stunningly beautiful and I liked her in her role. The actors who played Blackwood's agent and brother were very funny in their roles.

I recommend this movie. It is lighthearted, funny, and quite charming.

Tom Selleck is the titular character, "her alibi," who provides a beautiful murder suspect with a false alibi because he believes she is innocent. However, once he brings her back to his house, he begins to believe perhaps he was wrong - and now she is trying to murder him so that he cannot go back on his word.

Selleck's character also happens to be a mystery writer of cheap paperback books so he uses what's happening in his life as a parallel to his story, so at moments throughout the film we hear voice-overs of the story being narrated and it's played for comedy (example: Selleck makes a lot of noise while spying on the murder suspect, then in voice-over he reads a line from the book he's writing and says that the character in the book "quietly snuck up on the girl.").

Not a great movie, but it will entertain you.

Okay, I can admit that this was a fairly dumb movie, but that didn't stop me from enjoying myself. Tom Selleck was a good choice for this silly film, and Paulina Porizkova shows that she's more than just a pretty face. Sometimes it did get too stupid for my tastes, but it was still a good way to kill an hour-and-a-half. Yeah, it's not Shakespeare, but it's a lot more fun than Shakespeare.

Though not a masterpiece of film-making, HER ALIBI makes for a pleasant change from the violent films that Hollywood keeps on churning out. Tom Selleck and model-cum-actress Paulina Porizkova generate some genuine sparks on-screen in this lighthearted comedy/mystery. Selleck does well in the role of a once-popular mystery writer, while Porizkova, better known for her model-perfect looks, satisfies as the mysterious foreigner who captures the heart of Selleck.