Bound
4½ ****½ (of 5 stars)
Reviewed 10/13/96

Well, in all honesty I would have to say that the movie wasn’t as brilliant as I thought it would be. But I had had such high hopes for it that I should’ve know it wouldn’t reach its full potential for me. I had heard it compared to "The Last Seduction", "Red Rock West", and even one of my all time favorites "Blood Simple". This isn’t quite in that league, but it certainly is close enough to be put in the same category.

Gina Gershon is the star of the film, and she is fantastic. She will definitely be compared with Linda Fiorentino for a long time to come. It's hard to explain how rough she is, yet still attractive. She has an angled, bent face that kind of reminded me of Humphry Bogart, and I hope that is not an insult to her, because she is strangely erotic, even when she doesn’t look very pretty. While we see Jennifer Tilly all made up as if she is a model or something, we get Gina wearing rags and running a snake through a bathtub, painting, etc.. They don't necessarily play lesbian extremes, yet they make a good balance off of each other. I can’t say much about her wardrobe, but I swear that there is one lesbian I know whom I have seen wearing all half-dozen or so outfits that Gina wears as well.

This is Jennifer Tilly's most difficult role to date. She has to play both stupid and dumb at the same time, and since she has only played very dumb characters so far, I wouldn't have thought she could do it.

The cinematography is excellent, but when every shot is trying to be interesting, it ends up feeling rather forced. Like almost all first time talented directors, they feel as if no shot is a throwaway so they sometimes overdo it a little bit.

I’m also impressed by the fact that we never got those usually obligatory shots where the suitcase is in the center of the frame and the characters walk back and forth in the background. Probably the directors realized it would be impossible to be in awe of the amount of money that is in (or supposed to be in) the container when we have already seen it hung up individually throughout the room.

The script is also on a par with some of the best thrillers of this type. The story is very clever. We actually don’t know just who will get away with all that's going on, or how. There are many scenes where things could go horribly wrong for both the heroes and the villains. Each scene gains tension as what should be simple becomes increasingly complicated. The film reminded me of "Blood Simple's" classic scene with too much blood filling the room. Bodies just seem to keep stacking up and we can’t imagine how they could hide them all. There is one particularly tense scene where cops show up and can’t see what we can see. We cringe as a cop uses the bathroom while 3 bodies are in the bathtub next to him. Feeling reminiscent of Hitchcock, there is a scene where the ‘bad guy’ of the film is trying to hide all signs of foul play in his apartment and we are rooting for him as he cleverly does it.

The story also deserves credit in the fact that the bad guy really isn’t a true bad guy. He is really just sort of in the way. Joe Pantoliano is incredible here, as always. A lesser movie would have had scenes of him beating his girlfriend or trying to cheat the mob. Actually, he is just a semi-innocent victim of the greedy girls who have probably fewer morals, and more true criminal intentions than he actually has. In fact, it is hard to say who the good people in the film really were. Most of the characters just seemed real in the way that they were well rounded and 3-dimensional.

If I had to pick on one major problem I had, it is the flashback aspect of the story. All but the last 10 minutes or so of the film is told as if it were a flashback, although not really, since it isn't actually narrated. We just get shots of Gina Gershon bound in a closet about every 15 minutes or so. It was unnecessary and doesn’t really fool us into which direction the film could take.

Regardless of the hype and the commercials, there are very few lesbian scenes, but they are some of the most interestingly done love scenes in recent movies. The reason is probably because of those MTVish sex scenes that have been the same for at least the last 10 years. The type which only involves slowly panning over nude moist close-ups of just the female's body while a top 40 soundtrack plays in the background. Here instead we get some shots from a distance of what exactly is going on, or else close ups of what we wouldn’t think we’d want to see (the lips barely kissing, or the hands being held tightly together) but actually are probably are far more arousing than the full nudity would have made us.