The Real McCoy Reviews

Kim Basinger is a bank robber with a heart of gold and great legs, trapped into pulling off that all-too-familiar one last heist in this routine crime caper. Super-thief Karen McCoy (Basinger) pulled a ten-year sentence after getting caught in the middle of a bank job for criminal mastermind Jack Schmidt (Terence Stamp). After her release, McCoy unwittingly befriends good-natured petty thief J.T. Barker (Val Kilmer), both a big fan of her career and Schmidt's relative. He unwittingly leads Schmidt to Karen, and to force her to finish the aborted bank job, Schmidt kidnaps the only thing McCoy cares about, her six-year-old son Patrick (Zach English), now living with McCoy's loutish, remarried ex-husband, who has told the youngster his mother is dead. McCoy concocts an elaborate plan to break herself, Barker, Schmidt, and his gang into the bank, then double-crosses Schmidt and escapes with Barker. She returns to Schmidt's estate to rescue Patrick and steal $3 million to subsidize her flight to South America. Before absconding with Barker, McCoy arranges a rendezvous at the airport to return Patrick to his father, who is more interested in stealing the loot. Barker comes to the rescue, McCoy reveals her true identity to Patrick, and the three of them take off for Southern climes. THE REAL MCCOY suffers from spotty performances and a script filled with weak, underdeveloped characters that tend towards stereotypes. Basinger is so flat that even her devotion to her son is never quite believable, while Kilmer fares somewhat better; he gives his klutzy would-be robber a sense of depth at odds with the cliched material. We never learn how Karen became a thief, and her relationship with her ex-husband is inexplicable. Given both her humiliating job at an industrial laundry and tyrannical parole officer (Gailan Sartain) with wandering hands, it almost seems Schmidt is doing McCoy a favor by forcing her back into crime, and the reason they're such bitter enemies--a crucial issue--is never fully explained. The plot is built almost entirely around the caper and the double-crosses, but because the characters are so uninteresting, the plot twists seem entirely mechanical and predictable. Were it 87 minutes long and produced on a shoestring budget, THE REAL McCOY might, with a little imagination, have been a breezy, if inconsequential, crime caper. Instead, it slogs along for nearly two hours, an exercise in state-of-the-art production values and steadily diminishing returns. Director Russell Mulcahy (RICOCHET, HIGHLANDER) seems to have been on auto-pilot, utterly unable to breath life into material that has been done better elsewhere. (Profanity, violence.)