China Moon Reviews

A slick noir thriller that never breaks free of genre conventions, CHINA MOON is entertaining as long as you don't expect too much of it. Unlike THE LAST SEDUCTION, which also came out in 1994 (though CHINA MOON spent three years on the shelf, a victim of Orion's bankruptcy, before its eventual release), CHINA MOON is always predictable, even when the plot takes what are meant to be unpredictable turns. Kyle Bodine (Ed Harris) is a small town cop who thinks he's bigger than little Brayton, a tropical Florida town filled with pretty houses and dark secrets. He thinks he's seen it all, until he catches sight of Rachel Munro (Madeleine Stowe), a sophisticated vision in a low-rent bar. She's beautiful, aloof, and darkly unhappy, the kind of troubled, classy, married dame for whom palookas like Bodine inevitably fall hard. And he does, especially after he learns that her swinish husband Rupert (Charles Dance), a dissolute Southern aristocrat who delights in throwing around his breeding and influence, beats and humiliates her. They fall in love and bemoan their fate, until the dark and stormy night when Rachel kills Rupert, apparently in self defense. A sensible man wouldn't agree to help her dispose of the corpse and conceal all evidence of the crime, but whatever good sense Kyle ever had is long gone. He masterminds the cover-up, helping Rachel conceal the corpse, sending her to Miami to establish an alibi, and cleaning up the crime scene with a detective's practiced attention to detail. If anyone can outwit the police, it ought to be him, and if they can only weather the investigation, he assures her, everything will be all right and they can start their lives together. Naturally, that's not the way things work out. Suspicions are raised and clues surface. Bodine's bright young partner Lamar (Benecio Del Toro) finds himself in the uncomfortable position of suspecting his mentor as the circumstantial evidence mounts, slowly but inexorably. It comes as no real surprise to discover that Bodine isn't the first man on whom Rachel has worked her wiles: she and Lamar have conspired to set him up. CHINA MOON's screenplay (by Roy Carlson, whose credits include the quirky cable thriller THE WRONG MAN, 1993) will deceive no-one familiar with the protocols of noir thrillers, but the movie has several things to recommend it. Cinematographer-turned-director John Bailey (his credits range from THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST and THE BIG CHILL to IN THE LINE OF FIRE) doesn't miss a facet of the noir look: the rain-slicked streets, gloomy little rooms, and garish, sleazy bars all glow darkly with romantic menace. We've seen it all before, but it's always a pleasure to see it done well again. Ed Harris gives Bodine more depth and complexity than one has any right to expect, and Madeleine Stowe is a slender needle of a femme fatale, so secretly wicked that she seems peeled right down to the bone. The sex is steamy, and if the story contains few surprises, it moves along nicely and never fails to linger on the sort of details--what happens to a bullet when you fire it into a sand dune, for example, or the effect of a household humidifier on fingerprints--that can make the sordid world of crime seem like an enticing game of wits. (Profanity, violence, nudity, sexual situations.)