Twilight
for violence, language and some sexuality.
Reviewed by: Brian Nigro
CONTRIBUTOR
| Moral Rating: | Very Offensive |
| Moviemaking Quality: |
|
| Primary Audience: | Adults |
| Genre: | Drama |
| Length: | 94 min. |
| Year of Release: | 1998 |
| USA Release: |
| Featuring | Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon |
| Director |
Robert Benton |
| Producer | |
| Distributor |
Gratuitous.
That’s an accurate description of “Twilight”.
Gratuitous nudity (which reveals a big continuity error).
Gratuitous profanity.
Gratuitous story lines that go nowhere.
Gratuitous characters that go nowhere.
And a plot that doesn’t make sense.
Paul Newman stars in “Twilight” as a retired cop who becomes tangled in a blackmail scheme of a bedridden Gene Hackman and his flirtatious wife Susan Sarandon. Newman lives with them in a posh Los Angeles home for no other reason than he rescued Hackman’s daughter Reese Witherspoon from a bad man in Mexico. That bad man (Lieve Shrieber) is just out of prison and after Newman—although, Newman conveniently foils the bad guys with ironic ease, like he’s the Fonz on “Happy Days.”
On the home front, Newman openly and blatantly commits adultery with Sarandon. (And, oh, is Ms. Sarandon ever out to lunch in this role, I won’t elaborate.) And yet, in a pointlessly gratuitous plot thread ripped from “Cop Land”, Stockard Channing plays a cop who still has her eye on him.
“Hear that?” Stockard Channing asks Paul Newman in one scene, as she flushes a toilet. “That’s my job in the police force.”
Actually, I’d say that’s something else going down the drain. Paul Newman already did this movie before, in “Harper” (1966), a good rainy-day video rental. That’s all I could think about.
