Desperate Hours (1990)

DIRECTOR: Michael Cimino

CAST: Anthony Hopkins, Mickey Rourke, Lindsay Crouse, Mimi Rogers, Kelly Lynch, David Morse, Elias Koteas

REVIEW:

Bad movies are a dime a dozen. We generally know what they’re trying to do, they’re just not very good at doing it. Desperate Hours is on a whole other level, a movie not merely incompetent—although it’s that too—but so relentlessly strange that by the end, one is wondering what everyone involved is smoking, and if the proceedings might have been more enjoyable—if not necessarily more coherent—if you’d had some too. A loose remake of a same-named 1955 William Wyler film starring Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March and an earlier Broadway play, both written by Joseph Hayes, it’s purportedly loosely “inspired by real events”, although it also shares plot similarities with the 1951 John Garfield film “He Ran All The Way”. Director Michael Cimino and a script credited to Joseph Hayes, Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal tries to craft a slow burn suspense thriller, but seemingly have absolutely no idea how to go about it, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with ridiculous dialogue, unintentionally comical overacting, and plot holes you could drive a truck through. Unless one is imbibed enough to find the nonsensical proceedings hilarious, the only Desperate Hours might be the ones endured by the viewer.

The movie begins somewhat reasonably. Imprisoned criminal Bosworth (Mickey Rourke) has seduced his lawyer Nancy (Kelly Lynch) into helping him with a prison escape. Needing a place to lay low, Bosworth and his men, brother Wally (Elias Koteas) and hulking half-wit Albert (David Morse), inexplicably choose to commandeer a large and inhabited suburban house and hold the family—father Tim Cornell (Anthony Hopkins), mother Nora (Mimi Rogers), teenage daughter May (Shawnee Smith) and younger Zack (Danny Gerard)—hostage. The Cornells have already been having a bad day, as Tim is trying to reconcile with Nora, from whom he is separated due to his previous infidelity, and now are forced to play unwilling host to three fugitive criminals. Meanwhile, tough-talking FBI Agent Brenda Chandler (Lindsay Crouse) is on the case, first trying to pressure Bosworth’s girlfriend Nancy into a deal, then putting the Cornell home under surveillance.

If Desperate Hours does not begin particularly promisingly, there’s not immediate indication of just how far off the rails things will go. Cimino captures picturesque shots of getaway cars racing through winding mountain passes with painted skies and clouds of dust. Alas, it doesn’t take long for the bottom to fall out. The central premise makes no sense; while it’s logical that Bosworth needs a hideout after his prison escape, why choose an inhabited house full of people to try to keep under control and thereby subjecting himself to all kinds of unnecessary problems? Why not lay low in a seedy motel room? And why does he, despite stated plans to flee to Mexico, proceed to hang out here, passive-aggressively terrorizing the Cornells, for the rest of the movie? What is he waiting for? The screenwriters seem to be as confused as Bosworth is about what exactly his plan is here, and how he imagines it unfolding.

And if the central premise is logically dubious, that’s not even getting into the rest of the movie. There’s a pointless and laboriously drawn-out detour involving a side character that serves no purpose. Police snipers climb trees while the police circle in helicopters and set up roadblocks, yet Bosworth isn’t supposed to know he’s surrounded. At one point, FBI Agent Chandler has somehow wired up the house with surveillance equipment, though there is no explanation for when or how this happened without any of the characters inside noticing. Bosworth supposedly has everyone hostage, yet at one point Tim is somehow able to scurry out to his car and have an argument with Chandler, who likewise was able to sneak into the car out front without anyone noticing—and even if she could, why would she?—and then scurry back into the house without our inattentive home invaders noticing. Nor is Chandler’s “containment” bubble a match for the Cornell daughter’s boyfriend, who’s able to casually breeze right through the supposed police roadblock on a bicycle (!). Not once, but twice, characters are ordered at police gunpoint not to move, but then are gunned down anyway. The script feels like it was written by various people, all making it up as they went along and none of them reading what was on the page literal moments beforehand. According to some sources, Cimino’s original cut was butchered by the studio, resulting in a badly edited film. But even if this might explain some of the bizarrely glaring plot holes, it wouldn’t improve what remains onscreen. The goings-on inside the house are devoid of the claustrophobic suspense it presumably aims for, descending into an overwrought melodrama of struggles and would-be deals and weepy ultimatums and climactic over-the-top confrontations, all performed in a way that feels weirdly simultaneously muted and overacted. Needless to say, the estranged Cornell family is brought back together by their shared ordeal, but none of them are worth caring about, considering no one in the movie is a believable character. This isn’t helped by the overripe dialogue. “Bosworth needs killing!”, one policeman earnestly intones at one point. Chandler shouts nonsensical lines about the “forward observation post” and when asked if she’s hurt, answers “only in my ego!”. And then there’s the climax that involves a whimpering Mickey Rourke being physically dragged out the door while hanging onto Anthony Hopkins’ leg. A thrilling final confrontation, it is not.

The entire cast, even a normally-reliable distinguished thespian like Anthony Hopkins, seems at an utter loss as to how to play their characters, maybe because neither their characters nor their script makes any sense, and what results is an awkward mishmash of performances both muted and overacted, sometimes by the same person, sometimes somehow both at once. The most notable thing about Hopkins’ floundering performance is an all-over-the-place voice that starts out attempting an American accent and ends up sounding like Hopkins reprising Captain Bligh in some of his more psychotic episodes of The Bounty. Mickey Rourke tries to play against his thuggish type and play a suave, cultured villain (he drops pretentious lines like “a man is not really a man if he doesn’t know how to mix a proper Martini and tie a sensible bowtie”), but this just results in him feeling muted. We’re told Bosworth is a criminal mastermind with an IQ through the roof, but nothing about his nonsensical behavior onscreen makes that a convincing statement. Supporting players like Mimi Rogers, Kelly Lynch, Elias Koteas, and David Morse don’t make much of an impression. And then there is Lindsay Crouse’s FBI Agent Brenda Chandler. In a movie full of silliness, Agent Chandler gets the dubious honor of being the most ridiculous character; she swaggers around insulting everyone in her path (usually completely unnecessarily, because the script desperately and ineptly wants us to see her as a tough go-getter), she spouts ridiculous one-liners, and she masterminds a convoluted and nonsensical “containment” plan, all overplayed by Crouse in the phoniest Southern accent this side of Saturday morning cartoons. If one watches Desperate Hours from a “so bad it’s good” perspective—or drunk or otherwise under the influence—Crouse’s ridiculous character and cartoonish performance might be a hammy riot. Otherwise, she’s just the weirdest and silliest part of a movie with far too generous helpings of both qualities.

Is Desperate Hours worth watching on a “so bad it’s good” level? It certainly has its moments—at least two line deliveries, one by Anthony Hopkins, another by Lindsay Crouse, are so hilariously over-the-top that even all this time later, they’re still permanently lodged in my memory—but it also consists of too much awkwardly-staged tedium to maintain any entertainment on a consistent level, even if one is watching for its occasional and completely unintentional hilarity. This is a strange, muddled, incoherent movie, in which literally no one, whether the multiple screenwriters, the seemingly befuddled actors, or their less-than-brilliant characters, seem to have any idea what’s going on, and the viewer isn’t likely to either.

* 1/2