Review - Femme Fatale

This is really "Filmmakers I Love Letting Me Down Week," isn't it? First Wes Craven throws a steaming pile of dung in my face called Cursed, and now I watch Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale and want to bury razor blades under my eyelids and blink myself to sweet, sweet blindness.

Okay, so it's kind of a given that both Craven and DePalma are highly hit-or-miss directors, and for the past couple decades it's been mostly misses. I mean, looking through DePalma's filmography, I'm suprised to realize there's only one film of his I unabashedly love, and that's Carrie. But having made Carrie apparently fogives a lot. Like Snake Eyes. And Raising Cain. And Mission To Mars. And Bonfire of the Vanities. But I really like a few of his other films, like Body Double, Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed To Kill... yes, he's made a career out of raping Hitchcock's legacy, but he's had a lot of fun with it anyways.

Femme Fatale was a return to Hitch-territory for him, and to be fair comparing it to Cursed is needlessly cruel, it's better than Cursed. But then a colonoscopy with a garden hose is better than Cursed. Anyway, FF still has DePalma's great eye behind the camera; I really love his long panning shots and his use of color and framing. And, for some reason I don't want explained to me, I do like the way he always updates the stereotype of the icy Hitchcock blonde into a bisexual boob-wielding homicidal nymphomaniac. It's fun!

But FF just doesn't seem to know what it's about or where it's going. It has no... point, really. Rebecca Romijn is terrific as Mystique in the X-Men movies. Especially in the second one where she and Ian McKellan act like catty bitches towards everyone else. So I don't really want to be mean to her. She's not always horrible here. Not always.

Antonio Banderas is such a glob of grease on the screen these days. I just want to have at him with my shirt sleeve. Blecch.

And the third act twist of [spoiler] everything having been a fucking dream, and suddenly we're rehashing Groundhog Day??? What the fuck is that? It just comes out of nowhere, which is fine for a surprise that at least fits with the tone of the story... but this doesn't and is just... pointless. The movie's an exercise in pointlessness. I mean, so are Body Double and Dressed To Kill, but neither of them take themselves as seriously as this does. There was a real gap in tone between what was going on in the film and the way it was being played. It didn't seem to acknowledge what a camp fest it was supposed to be. A shame.

A sidenote - the French trailer for the film, included on the DVD, was better than the film itself. The trailer consists of the entire movie shown in super-fast forward with certain moments slowed down briefly, and at the end titles tell you "You've just watched the entire film, did you get it? No? Try again." I am paraphrasing. But it captured the tone the film should've had better than the film itself did.