Cold Around the Heart Reviews

A new twist on the old loser-lovers-on-the-lam double-cross each other story, or a tired retread? Writer-director John Ridley -- who penned Oliver Stone's U TURN -- tries hard, but seems outgunned by the conventions of hard-boiled crime drama and a bevy of characters so unbelievably self-aware and chatty about their inner demons that you're tempted to look for the Jenny Jones recruiter lurking somewhere just out of frame. Things begin promisingly enough, with a fast car speeding away from the police in some generic Southwestern desert. Shaggy-haired Ned (David Caruso) and bedraggled Jude (Kelly Lynch) are bickering; Jude reaches over to kiss Ned, and, just as she's about to smash their car into an oncoming vehicle, Ned is out the door and rolling on the blacktop. There's a pivotal, ambiguous plot point being introduced here: Does Jude deliberately attempt to run off with a mess of stolen diamonds or does she not? But it's not ambiguous enough: Jude is the kind of world-class rotten egg who might as well have "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" tattooed somewhere appropriate. Ned, fueled by the rage of the patsy, flees the cops, who are trying to stick him with a triple murder Jude committed, while she's off trying to fence the hot gems with Johnny Cokebottles (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and hooking up with loser T (Chris Noth), a complete ninny whom she hopes to get fired up enough that he'll kill Ned. Ned, meanwhile, picks up pregnant teen girl Bec (Stacy Dash), who immediately pulls a gun on him. Everybody double-crosses everybody else at least a couple of times before Ned asks Jude, "What the hell happened to us?" Since there's no chemistry between Lynch and Caruso, viewers are more likely to wonder what the hell made them "us" in the first place.