Key: Largo.

rmax304823

The story involves the theft of a multi-million-dollar necklace by thieves Jack Nicholson, who runs a wine shop in Miami, and Michael Caine, a safe cracker on parole. Nicholson packs his suitcase intending to leave his wife, Judy Davis, and his stepson, Steven Dorff, and run off to New York with his innocent girl friend, Jennifer Lopez. In New York, he intends to sell the hot ice to a fence and return to split the cash with Caine.

At the last moment, Nicholson has an argument with his wife, she clobbers him with a poker, frantically throws some clothes into Nicholson's suitcase, and drives off with her son. The necklace is stashed in a compartment of the suitcase, although neither she nor Dorff knows it.

They find out soon enough. Nicholson and Caine track them to Key Largo and there are arguments, fights, a car chase, until Davis and Caine wind up dead, Dorff takes off in his new boat for the horizon, Lopez drives off alone with one of the stones, and Nicholson winds up in the hands of the law.

It has a lot going for it. Nicholson and Caine rarely go wrong. Judy Davis does hysteria well. Jennifer Lopez is a natural actress, a beautiful young woman with a cantilevered rear end. The locations include some of the more colorful parts of Florida. And there's one effective action scene during, and immediately after, the car chase.

So why doesn't it work any better than it does? It's a mean-spirited movie. Every character seems greedy, spiteful, and deceitful. There's nobody to root for. It's easy to argue that this is rather more like real life than having good and evil splashed across the screen, but the values don't go much beyond that. No one has any particularly generous impulses. If someone dies, they simply disappear from the story. The only scene in which a genuine conflict of motives appears is when Nicholson is rooting around the bloodied body of his dying wife in an overturned car, searching desperately for the stupid necklace and sobbing with remorse at the same time. And even this is undercut by pettiness. Her last words to Nicholson: "**** you." The ill-considered roles cripple the performances too. Nobody is poor, but no one has a chance to do much more than try to outwit the others. It's also disturbing to see actors we like, like Caine and Nicholson, in parts so petty. They're fine when they are outrageously malignant and venomous. (Nicholson ululating hoarsely and limping through the snow with an ax in his hands.) But realistically, as reprobate as the rest of us? Nope.

I also can't understand why the location shooting doesn't take advantage of Miami and the Keys, where it was clearly shot. We see mostly interiors and back yards. Even a fishing boat in the Gulf of Florida feels claustrophobic. There's no sense of space or even of the city. And the photography doesn't help, somehow nudging a viewer into the perception that southern Florida is chilly rather than shimmering in humidity and heat. Where's the sweat? John Huston's "Key Largo" was all shot on a Warner Brothers' sound stage and does a better job of establishing the atmosphere. Finally, the MacGuffin -- that million-dollar necklace -- bespeaking a lack of imagination. Sounds like a job for Charlie Chan.

Well, I don't mean to be too harsh. It's not badly done. It's just that so many opportunities for it to have been better were missed in the script and in the direction. Disappointing.

score 5/10

rmax304823 6 January 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2002999/