leeper@mtgzx.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (10/03/89)
JOHNNY HANDSOME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A lion-faced petty criminal is given a
new face and a new life if he is willing to turn his back on
two murderers who betrayed him. Yet another crime film set
in New Orleans with a rather nice bleak tone at times.
Rating: high +1.
John Sedley is going to get a second chance at life. Mickey Rourke
plays John Sedley, who was born with massive cranial deformities known as
"lionheadedness." In spite of Sedley having a good mind, his life has been
a sequence of rejections, scrapes with the law, and foul-ups. Most recently
he was involved in a heist in which two of his partners, Sunny Boyd and Rafe
Garrett (played by Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen), murdered John's best
friend, made off with the takings, and left John to take the rap. Then as
an added stroke of viciousness they try to have him killed in prison. But
the prison doctors want to give John a new name and a new. much improved
face. He can take his new life or he can go back to his old life. His
surgeon thinks he will go for the new life; Drones, the cynical police
detective (played by Morgan Freeman) is convinced that John's unfinished
business will just be too strong an attraction.
Want to know which he does? Well, director Walter Hill is known for
violent action pictures such as 48 HOURS and RED HEAT. Hill seems to
specialize in stories about particularly sadistic criminals and likes to
create killers for whom simple killing seems too light a punishment. And
Boyd and Garrett are no exceptions. Hill brings Rourke back to New Orleans,
the site of Rourke's popular ANGEL HEART, although the New Orleans
atmosphere is almost ignored in JOHNNY HANDSOME, indicating that Hill is
nowhere the stylist that Alan Parker, director of ANGEL HEART, is. To
Hill's credit, however, he does get some atmosphere by subduing the color of
the film. (In spite of what Ebert and Siskel say, a good stylist really can
create a bleaker feel in a scene with color than with monochrome. It is
just easier to create a mood in monochrome.)
JOHNNY HANDSOME does not have a particularly original plot. Basically
the same story was told 53 years earlier in THE MAN WHO LIVED TWICE. For
that matter, both are really at heart THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. But JOHNNY
HANDSOME is a better made film than most of Hill's other chase films. The
mere fact that one particularly obnoxious woman in my audience irately
complained because it did not have the ending she expected indicates that
Hill is doing something right. I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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