Chantagem Fatal

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!

Doug and Lynn Kaines (Ron Silver and Rebecca De Mornay), furniture tycoon-wannabes, are in Mexico scouting out a new location for their business. Driving back home, they seemingly strike and kill a man standing in the middle of the road. Frightened, they drive on home. Shortly after they get there, however, Shell (Rutger Hauer) shows up on their doorstep, claiming to have been in Mexico and to be looking for employment.

The Kaines, presented to us as everyday people (albeit with money), instantly sense that Shell knows something about the hit-and-run - or does he? They don't know for sure - not at first - but even the possibility of the hulking Hauer being able to hold something over this affluent couple is enough to spook them. Complicating matters is the fact that Lynn's pregnant.

So what would YOU do? Charming, handsome ("in an outdoorsy way," Lynn says), eager to please, Shell seems like he wants to fit in - yet he drops hints that he might have been a witness to the accident. Screenwriting being what it is today, we have a pretty good idea things will wind up in the open before too long, but not before the lives of the Kaines are completely ruined. If the lead characters were in their twenties, we'd see Shell try to do something to their parents, but since they're all grown up, Mom and Dad are out of the picture. (Which is not to say that Shell doesn't find someone close to them to harass, of course!) The story gets sillier and sillier as it goes on, but somehow the performances by all three leads keep it afloat. Hauer's doing a role he can pretty much do in his sleep, but he hasn't lost any edge off it. All in all, a fine HBO movie.

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.)

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 film has a unique quality in the way the story is layed out before us. Imagine an optimal pace of the film and then slow it down a bit. In other films this would be a drawback because you would feel bored, but here the superb dialogs between characters create so much suspense that you will be far from bored and the slightly slower pace of the film will create a tension that you will physically experience in every muscle as you sit on the edge of your seat and watch the story unfold. This film shows us how when you feel guilty about something, everything you hear sounds like a prosecution. Otherwise this would be just one more of those nothing-special films, but the subtle insinuations in dialogs and an excellent cast led by Rutger Hauer make it a masterpiece. It feels as if everyone involved in its creation did a perfect job while at the same time being careful not to overdo it.

This is why I rated this film 10 out of 10.