So this is basically doing the same thing Body of Evidence did, but it’s doing it a lot better. Like, make no mistake, the story (written by Joe Eszterhas of Showgirls and Basic Instinct dubious fame) is still nonsense, but at least it’s coherent nonsense, and it stays in noir-esque thriller territory, rather than getting bogged down in a stupid courtroom trial. But the main thing is that the director is William Friedkin, whom you will remember from such movies as The Exorcist and The French Connection. Those aren’t my favorite movies or anything, but pretty obviously this is a step up from the made-for-TV direction of, uh, Uli Edel (who went on from Body of Evidence to direct an episode of Tales from the Crypt so yeah).

But I don’t want to hype this up too much, it’s still pretty stupid. So an ultra-rich guy is murdered with an antique hatchet in a kind of ceremonial way. And from there our detective/attorney (he’s an assistant district attorney, and is it normal for them to investigate murder cases?!?) hunts down clues that Something Bigger is happening, and finds out that this dude basically owned a sex villa where he’d provide powerful men with sex workers to get favors from them, but ps also secretly filmed them to super extra get favors from them.

And this goes all the way to the top, with the governor being implicated in this, which leads to the accidentally best line of dialogue in the movie, where the governor confronts the politically-ambitious ADA and warns him to drop this investigation or else “you’ll have as much of a future in this state as Jerry Brown.” In retrospect, this is maybe not the threat the dude thought it was.

So anyway, lots of people want this guy dead, but the real meat of the story is that the ADA talks to one of the sex workers who had been hired, who mentioned that a mysterious “Jade” had been the most prized of all the women there, and he’s trying to track her down and finally finds that… SHE’S HIS FRIEND’S WIFE (who he’s also had a thing for since college). This is zero percent surprising because of how the movie has had that couple as main characters for no obvious reason throughout, and when there’s a mystery woman in the movie and also a woman whose presence in the movie is inexplicable, it doesn’t take a genius to guess that these two threads are going to coincide, but I think that’s supposed to be a shocking revelation.

Oh, and speaking of shocking revelations, this is one of those movies where there’s a shocking twist (that you will see coming) in the last shot of the movie, then crash cut to the credits. These ’90s erotic thrillers really like their shocking twist endings. Kinda surprising M. Night Shyamalan never made one of these. (Or maybe he did, I guess I wouldn’t know.)

As a tangent, this movie is set in San Francisco, as is Basic Instinct (which my wife watched earlier this week, and I only caught the back half of, so didn’t write it up). What’s the deal with that? Is it just basically that everyone involved was super-influenced by Vertigo? Or did they just really want to have those car chases where cars go flying over hills?