The Deal - Il compromesso

I saw The Deal last night in Chicago. It's a dense film, with a lot of oil industry insider stuff, but very entertaining, and a really important film for people to see, given the path we're headed down in our country. Thought Selma Blair was terrific--best I've ever seen her. Robert Loggia, Colm Feore (my first time seeing him) great, too. Could have done without Angie Harmon, and would have liked the ending to extend out a bit further. I'd also have liked for there to be more intrusion of the reality of the $6/gallon world at war (which is the backdrop of the film) into the story--think that would have added even more punch--but none of that will knock a star off my rating, given the crap I've seen this summer so far--it's actually a 20 star by comparison. I guess I should say something about some of the negative critical reviews of the film. All I can conclude is that these folks are either lazy or overworked. In my experience, a lot of them have highly recommended films recently that are just garbage compared to The Deal. I guess the justification is supposed to be that these other films are "good escapes," but you know what? People already spend too much time in this country "escaping" instead of paying attention, and that's why we're in the mess that we're in. The Deal makes it fun to pay attention.

Slater stars in and co-executive produces this film, which means they got to use both his likeness and his money to try to help this film succeed, and it still flops. The movie is second-rate (or worse) in virtually every respect. With the exceptions of some of the names in the credits, this movie has almost no redeeming qualities, and of course the credits occur right at the beginning of the movie, so it's all down hill from there.

Loggia's a solid character actor, and Slater's decent playing the same character he always plays. Even though he's 36 now, he looks like he should be drinking a Shirley Temple during the bar scenes. Blair is a stone, and an anorexic-looking, awkward stone at that. She has no talent that I can detect, with a delivery that has all the depth and warmth of a petri dish. Think Keanu Reeves, only less attractive and with boobs. Very small boobs. She's also 32, not young enough to play the recent Harvard grad she's supposed to be. Angie Harmon is gorgeous, but unimpressive as an actor, and no one else in the movie gives any sort of memorable performance.

Blair's character's romance with Slater's is completely unbelievable, as there's no chemistry between them, so the audience is left thinking "What did I miss?" when the two of them suddenly start kissing for no apparent reason. Evidently the romantic music playing on the soundtrack while they sat in meetings with clients was supposed to demonstrate the build-up of their amorous feelings. It didn't.

The plot is the one thing this movie should have going for it, given the current state of gas prices and the war in Iraq, but it's such an obvious parallel and so close to home that it's too easy to dismiss, thereby undermining the entire premise of the film. Not that the poor writing, poor direction and poor acting do much to revive it, but this Deal should have died on the table.

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.

"The Deal" is an entertaining, but flawed political thriller.

Christian Slater plays Tom, a man about to close a huge oil deal. But everything doesn't go as scheduled, because blackmail and murder go hand in hand on Wall Street. Christian Slater is very convincing in his role. Selma Blair looks bored. John Heard does nothing to advance the plot. Angie Harmon plays a Russian spy. Her accent is off the mark.

The movie tries to be different because the climax involves not gunfire (well, there's some) but talking. It doesn't really work. But overall, it's worth seeing for Slater's performance.

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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.