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- "The Pledge"
(Reviewed January 6, 2001)
- This is the best-looking, best-acted stupid movie I have seen in a long time. Great cinematography, and Jack Nicholson makes a very badly written character very "watchable," but Good Lord, is the plot ever moronic.
First up, the film includes three of the biggest cliches in Hollywood:
(1) Jack Nicholson is a retiring detective who just Can't Let Go of his One Last Case. How the hell could the makers of this film read this script and convince themselves that nobody ever had seen this hackneyed device?
(2) The automatic suspect in a string of child murders is a churchgoing Christian. Look, I'm no Bible-thumper -- far from it. As a practicing atheist, I can take a pretty neutral view of things like this. But pinning the sins of the world on Jesus freaks has become as tiresome a Hollywood cliche as making every psycho turn out to be a Vietnam vet a few years back.
(3) Just when I thought this would be the one movie featuring a 70-something Hollywood leading man who does NOT get in the pants of a female half his age, Robin Wright Penn suddenly develops a jones for Jack in a fade-to-black makeout scene. Man, it must be nice to live on Planet Hollywood, where women get hot for guys the age of their granddads.
Oh, and about that plot. We are expected to believe that city detective Jack would buy and operate (by himself) a rundown rural gas station/convenience store solely to stake out the town where he thinks the serial killer lives. We are expected to believe that Jack would use an eight-year-old girl he comes to love as a daughter as a sex lure to entice the murderer -- without bothering to inform the girl's mother (whom Jack also obviously loves) that there is a psycho on the loose whose modus operandi involves grabbing and mutilating such girls. And the ending...hoo, boy. I won't ruin it except to say that it is simultaneously laughable, frustrating, and dumb beyond belief.
It's hard to believe that this was the movie Jack picked to be his first film since 1997's "As Good As It Gets." Hope it won't be another four years until his next one...and that it is one heck of a lot better than "The Pledge."
Back Row Grade: D (because Nicholson saves it from an "F")
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