Lonely
Hearts is based on the same case as the cult classic The Honeymoon Killers. That film at least felt like a true-crime
docudrama. This one feels like an ION TV
mini-series with an occasional naughty bit thrown in here and there.
The
tip-off that this ain’t your father’s Honeymoon Killers is that the female
killer is played by Salma Hayek and not Shirley Stoler. I mean, as one of the world’s leading Salma
fanatics, I can easily say she is one of the hottest women on the planet… which
makes her totally wrong for the part. At
least her partner, Jared Leto TRIES to look like his real-life counterpart,
although his performance comes up short next to Hayek’s (admittedly amusing) flamboyant theatrics.
While
Hayek and Leto are picking up rich women and killing them for their money, cops
John Travolta and James Gandolfini are on their trail. I like both performers, and neither one of
them phone their roles in. It’s just that
their dialogue is kind of rote. You
almost wish you could call for a do-over and see them act their scenes with a better
script. Likewise, Leto and Hayek are fun
to watch, and Salma in particular has a few moments of campy, vampy melodramatics,
but you kind of wish the whole thing came together as a solid whole and not a collection
of hit-and-miss vignettes.
Lonely
Hearts struggles to find a consistent tone, only occasionally hitting a bullseye. However, it’s not nearly as lurid as it
thinks it is, and it’s nowhere near respectable enough to work as a straight
true-crime thriller. Even though it suffers
from comparison to The Honeymoon Killers, with this cast (which also includes a
brief, but memorable bit from Alice Krige), it’s nothing less than
watchable.
AKA: Lonely Hearts Killers.
No comments:
Post a Comment