FEMME FATALE [ 1/2]
Flaky film noir. In English and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (strong sexuality, violence and language). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square; the Battery Park City 16, others.
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OPENING with a clip from the seminal film noir “Double Indemnity” sets the bar high for a movie positioning itself as a modern addition to the genre.
But Brian De Palma’s woefully defective “Femme Fatale” doesn’t even belong in the same room as Billy Wilder’s classic.
De Palma has seemingly expended all his energy on creating an uber-stylish look for his Paris-set thriller, leaving his actors to fend for themselves with his farcical screenplay.
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos throws herself into her role as Laure, the bewitching con woman of the title, but while she certainly looks hot vamping in various states of undress, her acting abilities can’t transcend the cardboard cutout De Palma has created.
It doesn’t help that she is required to embellish her caricatured part by delivering lines like “I’m a bad girl, a really bad girl.”
At least the sizzling lesbian sex scene with Danish model Rie Rasmussen serves a purpose: kicking off what proves to be an increasingly preposterous plot.
Laure relieves the model of her extremely valuable jewel-encrusted costume, but pulls a swifty on her partners and hoofs it with the goods.
In one of the most ludicrous flukes in cinematic history, she winds up in the apartment of a suicidal doppelganger who conveniently leaves behind a passport and a ticket to America.
Seven years later, Laure reluctantly returns to Paris as the wife of the U.S. ambassador (Peter Coyote), but a scummy paparazzo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her photo and, after it is plastered on the cover of a magazine, her double-crossed cohorts set off in hot pursuit.
The idea that the wife of an ambassador would merit a front-page splash is just part of an avalanche of laughable plot contrivances – there are so many, in fact, that it becomes an unintended running gag with a punch line that never arrives.
De Palma fools around with split screens and slo-mo, but no amount of cinematic artifice can varnish over the fact that this is simply a bad film.