Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours, a remake of William Wyler’s 1955 film The Desperate Hours, is as technically proficient as one expects from the perfectionist responsible for the much-maligned Heaven’s Gate. In the arresting opening shots, attorney Nancy Breyers (Kelly Lynch suggesting a Hitchcock blonde) races her car along a gorgeous mountain road above which pale blue skies are backdropped by snow-capped hills. Soon after arriving at her court date to represent her client, convicted killer Michael Bosworth (Mickey Rourke), she reveals during a recess that she’s smitten with him and that she’s smuggled him a pistol to stage a jailbreak.
This overblown opener, complete with exaggerated camera movements around the courtroom where lawyers and the judge speak in clichés as Rourke explosively over-emotes, is ludicrous enough. But things really go off the rails when Michael lays out his convoluted scheme after busting out of jail. Roughing up and dumping Nancy to make her look like a hostage and not his accomplice, Michael connects with his brother, Wally (Elias Koteas), and their friend, Albert (David Morse), to find a hideout while waiting to regroup with Nancy. They decide upon the house of Nora (Mimi Rogers) and her estranged husband, Tim (Anthony Hopkins), taking them and their children hostage as the criminals plan the next stage of their escape.
Desperate Hours came near the end of Rourke’s golden period as an actor, in which he proved adept at conveying how his characters hide their sensitivity behind stony exteriors, often playing them against expectation as quiet, yearning gutter poets. Here, though, he quirkily gives Michael a facade of respectability as the killer feigns consideration for his hostages, as in a scene where he puts on one of Tim’s tuxedos and relishes its fanciness. Rourke really hams it up throughout, delivering every line in a hyperbolic, mocking tone that muddies the tone of the film, making it seem as if it were trapped between a ’50s-era hard-boiled noir and satire of ’80s yuppie smarm. In trying so hard to project menace, Rouke comes off as a joke.
Even more miscast is Hopkins. Setting aside the actor’s lifelong inability to adopt a convincing American accent of any region, Hopkins is playing a man currently separated from his much-younger wife for having an affair with an even younger woman, yet he never digs into this seedy side of Tim. Indeed, Desperate Hours awkwardly redirects the character’s initial introduction as a scumbag into a noble hero in a way that’s liable to cause whiplash. And speaking of bad accent work, there’s no telling what Lindsay Crouse was going for as the F.B.I. agent on Michael’s trail; emoting in a robotically stilted, intermittently drawling voice, Crouse sounds like someone programmed a vaguely Southern voice for Siri or Alexa.
Cimino’s direction has his razzle-dazzle moments, like a close-up on a character’s sunglasses that reflects the movement of someone outside the frame, and a sniper’s dot pointed toward the lens and refracting through window glass and expanding into a huge red splotch. But the film, a patchwork of awkward and cliché conversations, never generates tension. A year after Desperate Hours’s release, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, itself a remake of a scuzzy classic-era noir, accomplished everything that this film set up but failed to explore, namely with its balance of old and new noir tropes and its explorations of a morally compromised protagonist who is as alienated from his family as they are to the crook who holds them hostage.
Image/Sound
MVD’s Blu-ray has been sourced from a transfer that’s clearly undergone no kind of restoration, as the image is occasionally made murky by heavy grain and digital noise. Flesh tones and colors are likewise inconsistent, sometimes faded and sometimes so shiny and overly boosted that the frame looks waxy. Audio is more solid, suffering no issues with clarity and boasting distinct separation between all the channels of the dialogue-heavy soundtrack.
Extras
The only extra included here is a brief featurette that illuminates little of the film’s production and omits entirely any discussion of the long-rumored director’s cut that supposedly addresses at least some of the existing film’s myriad issues.
Overall
Michael Cimino’s confused neo-noir receives a solid but barebones Blu-ray from MVD.
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