The Underneath (1995)
Michael Chambers has come home to Austin, Texas to his mother who's starting a new life, to his brother whose driven by old jealousies, and to Rachel—the woman he married and then betrayed with his passion for gambling. Now she's together with Tommy, so Michael devises a plan to get Rachel out from under Tommy's control.
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I love this movie so much
Absolutely Fantastic
When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
This movie is an updated version of the Burt Lancaster/Yvonne DeCarlo movie "Criss Cross". When viewed with that in mind I think the movie's production values really show off Soderberg's experiments with style in a much better light. The hospital sequence is more understandable, and the character's actions are better explained when viewed with the knowledge of the 1949 morality of the original. The casting was really well done, and Soderberg achieved the seediness of life on the edge of legality, and the pitfalls of blind love. The story is perfect film noir, and seeing updated stories like this makes you long for other directors to go back to that well and update other gems such as John Garfield's "Force of Evil", and director Robert Wise's "Born to Kill".
With two sets of flashbacks, count them two sets of flashbacks interspersed throughout the movie the last one catching up to where the movie begins in the present, it just makes a garbled mess. Kind of like the last sentence.I like Peter Gallagher and Elizabeth Shue, but she had such a small role and he couldn't save the convoluted mess that movie just seems to be told out of sequence like it is.The cinematography is nice if that's any consolation! I bought my copy at Walmart for $5.50 and I can't honestly say I'll ever watch it again. I can't recommend it, but I won't condemn it either.
This is a slow dreary movie. The main characters are unappealing and Peter Gallagher in the main role produces, in my view, a wooden performance. Best moments are the brief appearances of Joe Don Baker and Elizabeth Shue who both have a real screen presence.
Everyone, including Soderbergh I guess, likes to beat this one up... First of all, there is no such thing as too much style for this genre... secondly, the only bad neo-noir is the one that doesn't get made (except for that Val Kilmer piece of crap, Salton Sea)... and finally, YORK peppermint patties rock...