In the Cut
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In The Cut
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Review by Demetrius Payne
for Reel Movie Critic
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H
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Cast
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Meg Ryan
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Frannie
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Mark Ruffalo
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Detective Malloy
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Directed by Jane Campion. A dramatic thriller. Rated R for strong sexuality including explicit dialogue, nudity, graphic crime scenes and language. Running time: 119 minutes.
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This movie wants to be "Seven" meets "Sex in the City" but minus any intelligence or comedy
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Meg Ryan shows an entire, and I mean entire, different side of herself in this New York sized stinker of a movie where she plays Frannie, a writing professor who gets involved in an erotic affair with a police detective investigating a series of murders in her neighborhood.
Frannie is a woman who is very passionate about writing and words. I tell you this because it's something that is very obvious about the character, however, it has nothing to do with the movie. She has a half sister, Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's obsessed with a married doctor, again, obvious about the character but has nothing to do with the movie. Frannie meets Detective Malloy when he comes to her apartment investigating a murder that occurred in the courtyard of her building. Not much stands out about Detective Malloy; however, somehow he's alluring enough to Frannie that the two become intimate. Maybe this humdrum city girl is trying to spice up her love life by hooking up with a man with a gun, you never really know. As a matter of fact, I didn't know much about the movie when I went to see it, and even after the major characters were introduced I still wasn't sure. Other characters are wastefully thrown into the picture as a smoke and mirrors tactic to take your attention away from the real killer, a killer who likes to leave wedding rings on his victims' fingers, either before or after he cuts their heads off. You get no insight whatsoever as to why the killer kills, but there is plenty of blood to prove that he does.
"In the Cut" incorporates many things that make me upset about movies but the number one crime it's guilty of in my book is wasting time ¾ mine and whoever else suffers through it. This movie is almost two hours long, and could have been the length of an animated feature, if it had cut out all the scenes that didn't go anywhere. The fact the Frannie was a teacher didn't mean anything, her passion for words and writing never came into play. She had these crazy dreams or visions about how her father and mother met that foreshadowed nothing. Cut all those out and you still have a bad movie, but a bad 80 minute film is better than a bad 120 minute film. On the plus side you do see Ryan in the buff, something I never thought I'd see her do, and while some of the performances were good, good performances in a bad movie are like buying a bicycle for a pet fish…what's the point?
