The Deal

Christian Slater in "The Deal". Good lord in heaven: what did Slater do in a former life to deserve this movie? He has made a lot of really bad choices lately ("Mindhunters", "Masked and Anonymous", "Alone in The Dark") but this is the kind of script even Oliver Platt would walk away from. A laughably bad script from first (and hopefully last) time screen writer, Ruth Epstein, who should have kept her job at Goldman Sachs. The pathetic premise of an oil conspiracy is about as thin as an Olsen Twin, and the dialog is twice as brittle; made doubly so by Angie Harmon when she tries to pull off a Russian accent (which, if I've done my math right, means the dialog has the octo-brittleness of a single Olsen, but I digress). Slater tries to crawl his way through a flimsy maze of corporate deceit, while woman after woman can't help but chew his tongue. Slema Blair is actually very good as his tree-hugging girlfriend who shows him the path to salvation, only the scene where she actually show him anything must have been deleted, 'cause I never saw it. Maybe they're saving it for the DVD. There is simply nothing thrilling about this thriller. They must have just figured if the stacked the cast with actors like Robert Loggia and John Heard they could ad-lib their way around the awkward exposition. Director Harvey Kahn, who has produced an impressive body of work but directed nothing of note, must have compromising photos of the cast. Ultimately, Slater is totally miss-cast as a Wall Street hack. They should have gone with an unknown and then maybe they could have gotten away with the low budget production values and pass 'The Deal' off as a student film. You have been warned.

The storyline of "The Deal" has a good premise – the USA officially in war against the Arabs exclusively because of the oil and without any subterfuge. An American Oil Corporation requests the support of a credible Wall Street company to support a merging with a Russian Oil Company and get the supply of the necessary oil. An ambitious executive from Harvard is in charge of the deal and pressed by the Russians, the board of his company and his love for a colleague.

Unfortunately, the very confused screenplay is simply awful. It is almost impossible to understand the beginning of the story so confused it is. Later, the plot is disclosed and finally the viewer can understand the situation, with lots of betrayals and jealousy. There are three favorable reviews of this movie, and two of them are written by users with only one review issued in IMDb apparently to make a fake promotion of this film. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Contrato de Risco" ("Risk Contract")

The United States is in an oil crunch. So, when the banking firm that "Tom Hanson" (Christian Slater) works for gets an opportunity to make a deal with an oil firm that might have the inside track on some foreign oil, the firm is only too happy to jump at the chance. But there are risks involved, and Tom doesn't know the oil business that well. Add insider politics, the Russian mafia, along with corporate greed, and you have the basics of this movie. As usual, Christian Slater performs quite well. So too, does Selma Blair as his environmentalist girlfriend, "Abbey Gallagher". Unfortunately, I didn't care too much for the performance of Angie Harmon as the mysterious "Anna" mostly because her Russian accent seemed too artificial. One minute she's speaking in perfect English, and the next her accent is off the charts. Likewise, I thought the ending was too quick and convenient. But in any case, I still enjoyed the movie, and believe it's worth a look for those who like films of this nature.

It's rough to call something people worked on so hard for 'uneven' but there it is. The Deal is, simply put, about a 'deal'. It's a Wall Street thriller. And at the other end of the deal is oil. A planet in trouble where the carbon monoxide level is the highest it's been in three quarters of a million years, where 50,000,000 people are estimated to be on the run from climate catastrophes within four years, where the top twenty two median temperatures have been recorded in the past twenty six years, and so forth.

It's been done before and it will be done again until the dependence on fossil fuels is ended, until the electric car is allowed to proliferate, until the oil barons get their hands off the automobile industry, until things settle down in the middle east, and so forth.

Everyone does a fair job in this one except Angie. Sorry Angie, but for reasons that can't be exposed here but that will become apparent to viewers you just don't cut it.

The movie's uneven because its thrill factor is propelled through at least half way by withholding important facts about the plot. And at that point you just have to see everything turns out all right with the usual modicum of plot devices tossed in.

This film feels like a 70s TV series and is disposable. For example, take a look at the plane scene with Selma Blair and Christian Slater. Why, in this day and age, yes 2005 is still 'this day and age' use such an obvious fake airplane interior cabin? Little things like that annoy me and lose me because it's so avoidable.

Moving onto the story - I thought I must have been distracted, as we often are today, but looking at my cell phone, because I kept having to rewind to the beginning to figure out when and how this slop started. It just kind of 'starts'. There's no character development, and Slater's foiled 'hookups' have no depth or development behind them.