Unfaithful

Spoilers.  It’s gonna be hard to talk about this one without giving away everything so I’ll say right here that I’m giving everything away.  As far as recommending it goes it’s hard to say.  Very little happens but when it does it’s remarkable how stupid (read: aggravating yet funny) it gets.  

Diane Lane (Judge Dredd, Murder at 1600) cheats on her husband, Richard Gere (Chicago, Red Corner), with Olivier Martinez (S.W.A.T.). 

That’s it.  That’s the gist of this movie.  It was such a bore for such a long ass time.  The plot descriptions I read used phrases like “goes dangerously awry” and “in this erotic thriller”.  I waited and waited for something to fucking happen and started to think that those plot summaries were just some clever writing to sucker folks like myself in.  But then out of nowhere Richard Gere bludgeons Olivier Martinez to death with a fucking snow globe.  I mean one minute Gere’s confronting his wife’s lover about their affair and he says he feels sick and then suddenly he starts killing the guy.  It’s a complete waste of time to talk about anything that happens before this scene because it’s just Diane Lane and Martinez making googly eyes at each other and having sex while Gere acts kinda pissed off about everything.

Once the Frenchman was dead I was sitting there in disbelief thinking maybe Gere’s dreaming this.  I knew there was a bunch of the movie still left so I figured maybe Martinez is just knocked out.  But then Gere starts to clean up the blood and wipe his fingerprints off of things and wrap the corpse up in a rug ‘n shit and I’m like “holy shit.  He really did kill the sonuvabitch”.  I remember the trailer and TV spots never even hinting at any of this which is awesome but at the same time they also made it look like such a pussy movie.  Well, it’s certainly not a macho film but there’s some good shit here that they could’ve at least vaguely mentioned to try and make it look a little more exciting.

So once Gere sticks the body in the trunk of his car he goes to his son’s school play.  Afterwards a car in the parking lot backs into Gere and pops open the trunk.  It’s not wide open but just a little bit and he tries his damndest to close it even though it’s broken.  What bad fucking luck this guy has.  I mean he shouldn’t have killed Martinez to begin with but when is that backing into someone and accidentally opening their trunk shit gonna happen when you don’t have a body in there?  Never.  Then in the middle of the night Gere drops the corpse in a landfill.  No one will ever find it there right?  

Well let me tell you something jack, this motherfucker deserves to go to jail not only for murdering someone but also for covering it up in such a shitty way.  First of all Gere takes the snow globe murder weapon from the crime scene and puts it back on his mantle.  He hasn’t confronted Diane Lane yet about the affair so as far as she knows she got away with it and now that Martinez is dead she pretends like she never knew him anyway.  But she gave her lover the snow globe as a present.  So Gere is blatantly telling his wife that he knew about the affair and that he probably had something to do with his death.  You’ve got to destroy that snow globe man.  It doesn’t make any sense for Gere to bring it back to his house.  The other really dumb thing that he does is the way he disposes of the body.  You see Gere and Lane live on Long Island and Martinez lives in Manhattan.  Gere dumps the body on Long Island.  Why the fuck would his rotting fucking corpse be in a Long Island landfill?  He should’ve dumped it in the East River or on Staten Island on some shit but not in your own backyard.  You’re just making it look more like you’re the murderer.

The thing is that Diane Lane doesn’t cover up her affair well either.  She suddenly keeps herself very distant from her husband and doesn’t like to have sex with him anymore now that she’s found this new guy.  There’s also a part where she’s having lunch with two of her friends and Martinez comes into the café.  Lane excuses herself and they go have sex in the bathroom.  They also have sex in a movie theater.  And not only that but when she talks to the cops later she keeps changing her story about how much she knows this guy.  It’s like she’s hoping to get caught. 

The best part of the movie though is when Diane Lane puts all the pieces of the puzzle together and confronts Richard Gere about all this shit.  You think that it’s going to be Lane screaming at Gere and maybe slapping him and walking out or something but that’s not at all what happens.  Instead it’s Gere that starts yelling at his wife.  He says shit like “I know you Connie.  I know you and I fucking hate you.  I didn’t want to kill him I wanted to kill you!”  The weirdest part is that Lane just stands there and takes it.  If I were her I would’ve been like “why are you yelling at me?  I had sex with a guy.  You killed a dude asshole!” 

The ending to this thing is just as abrupt as the change in the direction of the plot.  It’s too bad that they couldn’t have made it more exciting all the way through.  Even after the murder it slows down again and not much happens except some police coming to question Gere and Lane.

Adrian Lyne did an incredibly boring job here but you can’t argue that much with his record as a sexy thriller director.  He’s done Nine ½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal, a newer Lolita with Jeremy Irons and Fatal fucking Attraction. 

This one was sort of an interesting experience but it was a lot of work to get to the payoff.  I’m glad I saw it but there are better sexy thrillers out there.

Sex Scenes: Two.  There are bits of sex ‘n shit but I think there are only two fully formed sex scenes in this one.

After Sex Scenes: There’s a couple here and there.  I had trouble pin pointing exactly how many.

Strange Cameos: Kate Burton plays one of Diane Lane’s friends and she’s Kim Cattrall’s reporter friend, Margo, from Big Trouble in Little China.

Zeljko Ivanek, Governor Devlin from Oz, plays a police detective that questions Lane and Gere.