Release Date: November 12, 2004
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Woody Harrelson, Don Cheadle, Naomie Harris
Directed by: Brett Ratner
Written by: Paul Zbyszewski, Craig Rosenberg
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexuality, violence, language)
I am not sure what to make of After the Sunset, a movie that simultaneously wants to be so many things -- heist movie, police thriller, erotic thriller, exotic thriller, buddy comedy, screwball comedy, dark comedy, romantic comedy, and more -- and spectacularly fails at all of them. It is surprising, to say the least, considering that it features a handful of competent, A-list actors and a director, Brett Ratner, who became famous for the smorgasbord buddy picture when he did Rush Hour in 1998.
Or, on second thought, maybe not. Sunset, which was written by Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg and takes place in the Bahamas, is very similar to The Big Bounce, another bad caper/buddy movie with a tropical setting. It has the same interracial cast of con men, mobsters, crooked cops, and hangers-on, who are all part of a who’s-scamming-who story that’s far less suspenseful or intriguing than it thinks it is. Somebody needs to send a memo to Hollywood that not every caper movie set in paradise will turn out like Elmore Leonard.
In After the Sunset, the players are as widely varied as they are unbelievable: Pierce Brosnan plays Max Burdett, a professional jewel thief, who has decided to retire to the Bahamas with his girlfriend and partner-in-crime, Lola (Salma Hayek), after a brush with death on his last job. Woody Harrelson plays Special Agent Stan Lloyd, a Fed who has been tracking Burdett for seven years and believes that his relocation to the tropics is nothing more than a cover for his next score: the heist of a rare and valuable diamond on display aboard a cruise ship docked in port. Also in the mix are Henry Mooré (Don Cheadle), a gangster who wants to hire Burdett to steal the diamond for his own purposes, and a local cop named Sophie (Naomie Harris) who teams up with Agent Lloyd to throw a wrench in Burdett’s plans, whatever they may be.
For Brosnan, this marks his latest in a series of unconvincing efforts to distance himself from the James Bond franchise -- though he has made tentative forays into other genres, he seems more comfortable within the familiar boundaries of action and heist thrillers (see also: The Thomas Crown Affair, The Tailor of Panama, and Dante’s Peak). Max Burdett, his character here, seems all too easily cobbled together from bits and pieces of Brosnan’s roles in those previous movies, and the actor confirms this by sleepwalking through the film -- he doesn’t even bother to strike up any kind of chemistry with either Harrelson or Hayek.
This is regrettable, since his character -- not to mention the movie -- depends on it. To obscure his true intentions (or maybe not), Burdett confronts Agent Lloyd on his first day on the island, and the two end up becoming fast friends. This is a hard pill to swallow, since it undermines Agent Lloyd’s whole ruthlessly-dedicated federal agent aesthetic, but it goes down like a shot of smooth-sippin’ Tennessee whiskey (Burdett’s favorite drink) compared to the romance between Max and Lola. I’m not really sure why they’re partners, since she clearly brings little to the table in the thievery department, and their relationship consists of, alternatively, sex and petty infighting (Lola wants to settle down and get married, and at one point even accuses the hesitant Max of cheating on her with the diamond).
The rest of the characters are script baggage, and the movie knows it, because it has several different streaks of at least a half-dozen consecutive scenes that have nothing to do with the plot proper (the scene in the middle of the movie when Burdett and Agent Lloyd go deep-sea fishing is basically a Heineken commercial). Sophie, the Bahamian cop played by Harris, is there to give the movie another accent, and Agent Lloyd a love interest he does not deserve -- he is not remotely a good cop, or even a good womanizer. And running a close second in the useless category is the gangster played by Cheadle, who would be a real, stereotypical bore except that he gets the movie’s best lines. (“I put the thing above the E,” he says, by way of explaining his French-sounding name and his American heritage. He also touts the philosophical values of the Mamas and the Papas in a small speech that is -- just maybe -- worth the price of a rental.)
Neither of these characters play pivotal roles in the plot, and if you’re thus left wondering why the actors who play them get such high billing, it’s because this is a bad movie. It’s also a movie that thinks it has everyone fooled (as if any could care that much), which means there is a long-overdue twist in the last act. Needless to say this twist, which involves Agent Lloyd, is an incredible diversion from everything the movie has previously established to be true about him -- namely, that he is a grade-A screw-up.
It was around this time that I realized that I, too, was part of a con game -- the one in which the sometimes-talented Ratner fooled me into thinking that he would be able to tap yet another deep vein of enjoyable action-comedy. But whereas there may be a happy ending for some of the characters in After the Sunset, there was no happy ending for me, nor will there be for anyone else who sees this movie.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)