Released from prison after being cleared of charges, Harry Barber tries to get his life back when he is approached by the beautiful Rhea Malroux with a proposition to make money. It's simple - Rhea's stepdaughter will pretend to be kidnapped, Harry will write the notes and Rhea will get $500,000 ransom money from her rich elderly husband without the police ever getting involved. Needless to say, things don't go totally to plan and, after Harry collects the money, things go badly wrong and he finds himself desperately trying to get out of the web he is caught up in.
An ex-con gets approached by a gorgeous woman and is seduced into committing a simple crime - typical noir territory, cue a twisty thriller where things that are presented as facts turn out to be lies etc. The plot is quite good even if I was waiting for the twists rather than having them come out of leftfield at me. The lack of real surprises was a problem for me as it did turn the story into rather a workmanlike affair at times. The characters aren't great either. Aside from Harry all the others are basic cardboard cut outs of characters rather than being well scripted people.
Harrelson does a good Harry, he has a sort of haggard yet oafish character here who is always one step behind and Woody can do that quite well. Shue is OK as the supposed femme fatale but I couldn't help feel that Gershon would have done a much better job, although at times Shue does look very sexy. Sevigny and Rapaport are both good young actors but neither is really given anything to do here - especially Rapaport who has bad dialogue throughout.
Overall though this is watchable and isn't bad - just routine. It has weaknesses but it does well to ape the atmosphere and prerequisites of the genre well, although it is pretty run of the mill as far as the genre goes. Still worth seeing but if you've seen more than three examples of the genre then you'll know pretty much what to expect.
