Tequila Sunrise (Robert Towne, 1988, USA) April 3, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 1980s, Drama, Film reviews, Crime , trackbackLike my unfortunate Physics classes during my teen years I sat in front of Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise and wondered if I was the only one who hadn’t a clue what was going on. Mel Gibson has a conversation about something, then Kurt Russell says something about Gibson, then Michelle Pfeiffer has sex with Russell, but falls in love with Gibson who she then has sex with (or does she fall in love with him after they have sex), and then there’s some more conversations. By the time the credits roll you just want to ring Robert Evans and congratulate him for saving Chinatown.
Some will argue I never gave this film a chance to impress. The sun-kissed photography, shiny stars (Gibson, Russell, and Pfeiffer), post-Chinatown noir, intricate plot, and sex for good measure, all have the makings of something rather delightful. However, there’s very little delight in watching a pretentious director overplay a screenplay which he clearly holds far too dear. Of course, the only scripts Towne would parade as gallantly as this would be his own, so it comes as little surprise that Tequila Sunrise is written and directed by Towne. But for a director the key is in knowing exactly how to nurture a script in its transition from word to screen. You have to be able to take liberties, to sacrifice some the scripts greatest attributes. Towne has no such self-control and his film seriously lacks a sense of narrative thrust.
Kurt Russell and Mel Gibson are both excellent, providing the film with personality and heart but they have no affect on the overly complicated plot and mishmash of character fore-stories and back-stories. Michelle Pfeiffer is beautiful and alluring in the femme-fatale role but the sub-plot of loyalties and love simply detracts from could have been a better developed relationship between Russell’s cop and Gibson’s dealer.
If there’s any saving grace for Tequila Sunrise it’s that it only lasts for two-hours, but as it ended, and I realised I’d broken the remote from distracted-messing, I knew it had felt a lot longer than that.
Rating: 2 out of 5
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