Alan J. Pakula directs Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in this yuppie in peril thriller where the mysterious new neighbours encourage the boring nice folks next door into insurance fraud… then wife swapping… then HOLY SHIT!

A batshit mental forgotten thriller but not a particularly good time. Nobody behaves or reacts in a way that could be construed as believable. The plot developments jerk forward out of nowhere, leaving you discombobulated rather than engaged. There is so much we are not being shown, or that is given so little screen time, you feel something is being obscured in the service of some ultimate revelation… but eventually it just all sums up to an uzi gun battle. Really? An uzi!? Lessons learnt: 1) That is the very worse way to do a wife swap. Tantamount to rape. 2) Spacey cooks here. Though many of his lines of dialogue have taken on darkly hilarious double meanings since #metoo. 3) This feels like an awful parodic rehash of American Beauty at times, so weird it came seven years earlier. 4) I had to google whether femme fatale Rebecca Miller was Marilyn Monroe’s daughter. She isn’t. She could be. 5) Erotic thrillers should have at least some nudity in them. All in all; A cheesy car crash that I reckon those involved thought might be in the running for Academy Award buzz. Hubristic but never boring.

5

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