Criminal Hearts Reviews

In the crime adventure CRIMINAL HEARTS, an innocent young woman is ripped from her staid lifestyle when she teams up with a wanted man. With the southwest desert as their backdrop, these "Bonnie and Clyde wannabes" take on corrupt lawmen in this frantic highway thriller. Keli (Amy Locane) is driving to Phoenix to confront her cheating fiancee, when she picks up Rafe (Kevin Dillon), who, unbeknownst to her, has just robbed a gas station, getting a surprisingly large amount of cash. They soon end up sharing a bottle of wine, as well as a bed, and it's only when Amy discovers a pistol under his pillow, that she becomes suspicious. It turns out that Rafe is actually robbing these stores of illicit drug money, but since someone else is later on killing these store owners, their murders are also being blamed on him. Soon, two corrupt FBI agents, Martin (M. Emmet Walsh) and Tierney (Michael James McDonald), are on the trail, taking time out to eliminate everyone who knows about their secret drug operation. Along the way, Keli and Rafe infiltrate a US Border Patrol warehouse, become captured by Mexican drug runners and tied to a cactus in the middle of the desert. Keli eventually makes it home with the money, thinking Rafe is dead. The FBI men storm in, having found the still-alive Rafe, and Keli shoots both of the Feds. Luckily, she first captures their confession on her answering machine, thus proving the young lovers' innocence. Though the story offers little new, writer/director David Payne tries to cover up that fact by keeping his characters running back and forth across the desert, or turning on each other at a moment's notice. Believability plays little part in the proceedings. Thankfully, as Rafe, Dillon's wise-ass demeanor helps make up for Locane's ludicrous role as Keli, which overnight transforms her from a gun-shy innocent to a crack-shot action heroine. Meanwhile, solid character actors M. Emmet Walsh and Don Stroud serve time in quirky, but painfully underwritten, roles. And Morgan Fairchild fans mustn't get their hopes up---she receives less than one minute of screen time. Despite some effective seedy locales, this movie remains a convoluted crime hodgepodge that moves fast, leaves a trail of corpses, and doesn't have a fresh idea in its head. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations.)