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.
