The Last Seduction (1994)

Best movie ever!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

When a critic views a film that is different from most of the films they have to see, they often give it an undeserved rave review. That is what happened with this piece of garbage. This is one of the worst films ever made. There is not a single character that is sympathetic (and we meet quite a few), the story makes very little sense, the femme fatale has to be the most unlikable such character ever, yet she is able to make everyone do her bidding, and nobody in the film reacts as normal people do. There is absolutely no reason for Mike, the main male character that Wendy, the femme fatale, meets in a bar to love or even like Wendy, but we have to accept his behavior to accept the movie. But you can't accept his fondness for Wendy at all, especially the more he discovers about her. This movie is 2 hours that I will never get back. Don't believe the hype. Sitting in your bedroom contemplating your 4 walls is time better spent. Make no mistake--this is unadulterated crap which made me realize just how good film noirs of the 40's and 50's were. They had well-defined characters and a story worth following. This film has nothing!

This is one twisted chick in one twisted film. The thing that obviously attracts us to the female character is her beauty, and brains. No one could be this evil and still have men chasing her without "something." And the "something" is that she's sexy as can be a real knock-out. Linda Fiorentino is one of Hollywood's overlooked gems. Not only is she incredibly beautiful, but she is also a gifted actress. She'd made a few forgettable films prior to this, but this is the film that sent her star rising up-word. She delivered what had to be the hands down best performance of the year, in what had to be the best film of the year. Yet because it was first released to cable she was unable to be nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actress).There may be plot holes in "The Last Seduction," but I didn't notice them. And when Fiorentino's character (Bridget) burns a piece of evidence at the film's end, it certainly makes a case that the writers were not slack with the details. The other point that made me hesitate was the full screen treatment, and claims of a poor quality film transfer. I'm a widescreen viewer, but please do not let this full screen treatment discourage you. As for the quality of the film, it's a bit grainy, but I felt that actually gave the movie more of a gritty "film noir" look. After watching, I felt the tragedy as well. All that intelligence, calculation, expense of energy....for what? All for a tragic goal, although a tragic goal is not the same as a tragic ending. Poet W. S. Merwin nailed it with: "if we only knew, if we only knew what we needed, the stars would look to us to guide them." Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

Everything about "The Last Seduction" is totally outrageous; its characters, its plot and most of all its femme fatale who scales previously unchartered levels of wickedness and cruelty in order to satisfy her lust for money and her desire to eliminate her husband. Realism and suspense are the main casualties as this cleverly plotted thriller entertains by being provocative, humorous and nicely twisted. As a 1994 neo-noir, it's stylish, well-written and in contrast to its 1940s and 1950s predecessors, is also able to end in a way that wouldn't have been possible in the days of the Hollywood Production Code.After completing a drug deal with a couple of very threatening gangsters, Clay Gregory (Bill Pullman) returns to his New York apartment with his nerves in shreds and $700,000 stuffed inside his shirt. With enough cash to pay off his huge gambling debts and buy a smart penthouse apartment, he's starting to feel relieved until his sharp-tongued wife, Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) calls him an idiot and he responds by slapping her across the face. When he then decides to take a shower, Bridget promptly bags all the money, leaves the apartment at great speed and doesn't stop until she gets to a small town called Beston (near Buffalo). There, in a small bar, she gets picked up by a local young man called Mike Swale (Peter Berg) and they launch into an affair in which she's the dominant partner and uses Mike purely as a "sex object".Bridget, (now calling herself Wendy Kroy), takes a job at the Beston insurance company where Mike also works as a claims adjuster and ignores him when he says that he wants a relationship that's more than purely physical. Her main preoccupation is to devise a way of keeping all the money she's stolen and making sure that her husband isn't able to claim any of it. Clay is desperate because he's being "leaned on" heavily by the loan sharks who want him to repay his debts and so he hires a private investigator called Harlan (Bill Nunn) who traces Bridget and makes an attempt to recover the money. The way in which Bridget deals with the threat that Harlan poses turns out to be amusing, unorthodox and ultimately, very effective.Through his work, Mike is aware of a method of recognising cheating husbands by checking out their credit card arrangements and when he tells Bridget the details, she soon gets to work on a plan to use this method to set Mike up to kill Clay. Inevitably though, numerous problems then arise as the not-very-bright Mike attempts to complete his mission.One of the best features of this movie is its dialogue which is often sharp and witty with Bridget's conversations with her lawyer Frank Griffith (J.T. Walsh) providing some particularly entertaining exchanges. At one point he asks "Anybody checked you for a heartbeat lately?" and on another, when she asks "Are you still a lawyer?" he replies "Are you still a self-serving bitch?" Linda Fiorentino's character in the movie has all the typical femme fatale qualities, such as being manipulative, treacherous and deadly but is also incredibly ill-mannered, coarse and amoral as she ruthlessly deals with every man who gets in her way. Fiorentino does a great job of displaying all the swagger, attitude and coldness that makes Bridget Gregory so odious and memorable and Bill Pullman and Bill Nunn also do well in their supporting roles.

At first, The Last Seduction felt like a sleazy exploitation pic, but it quickly surpassed my expectations. John Dahl's film is a surprisingly sophisticated neo-noir, which addresses all the prototypes of the classic film noir, but places the femme fatale at center stage, and re-examines the character prototype, through the filter or more modern views on values and genders. The Last Seduction plays with the viewers' expectations, and with the way they view the characters and their actions.And aside from all that, it's a very well-paced, well-constructed thriller which keeps the audience interested at all times, slickly executing dialogs full of subtext and tension. Linda Fiorentino (is this seriously the same girl from Dogma?!) is phenomenal in the lead role, and Peter Berg more than pulls his weight too, though his character seems simple and flat at first it grows and develops throughout the film. The only real fault I can find is Bill Pullman's ridiculous performance - he should really stick to comedies. But he pulls it together for the finale, a deliciously wicked and satisfying conclusion that ties all the loose ends. Definitely recommended.