Consenting Adults (1992)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Crappy film

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

To those who say this is Hitchcokian...then you're that familiar with a Hitchcock film. Hitchcock would have had MUCH better pacing. The set up here was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I had thought this was just about wife-swapping, so I'm glad I stuck with it...but the only reason I stuck with the long "first half" was that I really like Kevin Kline and Kevin Spacey.And that's just for starters. Too many machinations to be plausible. That's where the too clever for its own good comes in.Is there a saving grace? Yes. Stellar acting from Kline and Spacey. It was still a couple of years before Spacey hit his stride (with "The Usual Suspects"), but he deliciously evil in this film. Never trust a man who wears white shoes! Did Kline ever hit his stride? I think not. Instead he had a nice steady career. But he's great here. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is very good as Kline's wife.Do I recommend this film? With strong reservations. If you don't generally enjoy Kline and Spacey, I'd skip it. But if you're a fan you'll probably like it. Just don't really expect to be sitting on the edge of your seat. It's not that suspenseful.

Richard and Priscilla Parker's lives take a turn for the better when Eddy and Kay move into the house next door. Eddy's a risk taker and shows his new neighbours how to enjoy life at the expense of a rule or convention or two. What Richard doesn't realise is that Eddy's little games are just a prelude to something that's intended to destroy his neighbours' lives...The film tries really too hard to be a Hitchcockian thriller, and it does really well up until a point, but then like most movies like this released in the early Nineties, it goes all fatal Attraction and has the normal friend go all nuts at the end.If they had left out the murders, which ruined the film and any plausibility it had, and concentrated more on the fraud part of the film, this could have been an entire different beast.But no, people in the nineties were really asking for more eroticism out of their thrillers, or so Basic Instinct told us, so it goes for the wife swapping route, which ruins it.Kline is great as always, and it's always funny to see Spacey in trash like this, before he met Keyser Soxe.So all in all, it had so much potential, but spoils it all by almost going to the audience 'Phwooar' get some of that Mrs...

This is odd. The director and co-star of "Sophie's Choice" teamed up again and made one of the most confusing movies. Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play a laid-back couple whose new neighbors (Kevin Spacey and Rebecca Miller) aren't quite what they seem. Spacey's role gives a faint hit of Lester Burnham, but there's no real way to compare "Consenting Adults" with "American Beauty". The movie is just weird. I'm befuddled as to how Alan J. Pakula, the man behind "Klute", "The Parallax View", "All the President's Men" and "Sophie's Choice", could fall down to this. Admittedly, not everyone can have a perfect record, but something as low-quality as this? Just bizarre.

This movie had been in my Netflix Queue for sometime and I decided to give it a watch after meeting Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio in person (very gracious lady). Anyway, I'd seen the film before, but it had been many years. After viewing it again this time around, I came to the same conclusion. The first half of the story is very engaging and interesting. Kevin Spacey is brilliant in one of his early roles. Mastrontonio and Kline are also very appealing. You like the characters and you care about them. However, the second half of the film, the "thriller" portion, is so lame and unrealistic that I completely lost interest. It's as if the writers simply gave up on how to finish this film off. They created very interesting characters, set up a nice story, but the story didn't have anyplace interesting to go. I'd love for someone to try a rewrite of this thing. Anyway, not much going on here with this film. The only relevance it has is if you are a Spacey, Kline, or Mastrontonio fan. Rating 5 of 10 stars and that is being somewhat kind.