Malice (1993)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

One of my all time favorites.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Is Malice one of the last films of the 1980s?Strange question for a movie made in 1993, right? But no ... I think movies take a long, long time to get made, and they reflect what was in their creators' minds at the time of the creation. Easy to think that Malice was a product, literally, of the late 1980s.What I saw was Yuppies. Doctors and Lawyers and College Deans. Big city apartments, waterfront houses on the point. That 80's hair and 80's clothes. Not a sighting of (soon to be de rigueur) flannel shirts to be seen. No beards. No trust fund or startup company kids starting grunge bands.I also saw an "end of the 80's" message, tiny, a little veiled, but there. Let's get to that (and it is our tiny little spoiler). The 1980's was about conspicuous consumption, of stretching the limits of experience in everything, fine clothing, fine automobiles, interesting food, wine, drugs, etc. It didn't really matter how you got there, so long as you were a consumption machine, consuming the finest of everything ... you were "King of the 80's".SPOILER ABOUT TO HAPPENSo, just as 1987's Gordon Gekko said "Greed is Good" and we were starting to doubt that truth ... Bill Pullman's character let's slip a final nail in the 1980's Yuppie coffin. This is right at the end of the movie, where he needs some ice for a wound he received: "I'll have mine in a glass with some scotch...single malt, nothing blended. Blended whiskey is crap. Someone told me that once."But the way he said, "Someone told me that once" comes off as very dismissive. It is said with a little tiny bit of derision. Enough to say, F the scotch, let's drink a Busch beer, jump in the mosh pit, and get the 1990's grunge scene rolling ...Where Ordinary People (a 1980 film) is one of my early 1980's films, the transition from the 70's to the 80's ... Malice is now my transition to the 1990's film, or at least the last of the 1980's films.I hope comments from you and others may improve upon my judgment here. I came of age in the 1980's, graduating high school in 1985, and the good and bad of that decade are really interesting to me ... especially as we become the rulers of the universe, for real, this time. Are we going to bring our bad or our good 1980's ideas with us?

Yes, it's true this movie has plenty of flaws and is full of plot holes. However, if you are willing to look past all that, "Malice" can be a diabolical treat!! It boasts an awesome cast, which includes Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, and Gwyneth Paltrow (in one of her earliest roles) and is highly entertaining all around!The acting is dead on, especially by Alec Baldwin who churns out a chilling performance as a supremely arrogant surgeon with a chip on his shoulder. Also, this is one of the only roles I can recall where Nicole Kidman plays a purely evil character with sinister motives, and she pulls it off well. The film begins with a serial killer/rapist wreaking havoc on a small, New England town. Bill Pullman and Nicole Kidman play a married couple who somehow get involved with Alec Baldwin and that is where things start to take a turn for the worse. The film is wonderfully eerie and chilly. It reminded me a bit of an old Hitchcock film. Again, if you can bypass some plot inconsistencies and swallow the red herrings thrown at you, you will indeed be entertained. Some might call it trashy entertainment, but this film still remains to be one of my all time favorite thrillers!

A tale about a happily married couple who would like to have children. Tracy teaches art, Andy's a college dean. Things are never the same after she is taken to a hospital and operated upon by Jed, a "know all" doctor.Roger Ebert called the film "one of the busiest movies I've ever seen, a film jampacked with characters and incidents and blind alleys and red herrings." Many critics mention the red herrings and this has led to the film being critically downplayed, getting mixed reviews. In fact, this was a large part of what I enjoyed -- finding out every so often that things I thought were important really made no difference.The best thing about films like this is that they make you (or at least me) want to watch them again to see what was missed. Surely knowing some outcomes will make the second viewing all the more interesting.

Malice is directed by Harold Becker and co-written by Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank from a story by Jonas McCord. It stars Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Peter Gallagher, Bebe Neuwirth and Josef Sommer. Music is by Jerry Goldsmith and cinematography by Gordon Willis.Andy (Pullman) and Tracy Safian (Kidman) take in a respectable Dr. Jed Hill (Baldwin) as a lodger thinking he ticks all the ace lodger boxes. However, he turns out to be far from ace and after having to perform emergency surgery on Tracy, the Safian's world gets turned upside down...Malice is an old fashioned thriller, it has flaws and major implausibilities, but if taken on its own popcorn thriller terms it rounds out as a good night's entertainment. There's considerable thriller talent involved in the production, with Becker (Sea of Love), Frank (Dead Again), Sorkin (A Few Good Men), Kidman (Dead Calm) and Baldwin (The Hunt for Red October) all having been party to producing some quality genre offerings. It's loaded with betrayals and shifty shenanigans, and when the surprises come they are genuinely smart and worth the wait. But why the makers decided to tag in a pointless serial killer sub-plot is anyone's guess since it has no bearing on the otherwise well thought out story. Cast are on form, with Baldwin revelling in oily egomania and Pullman classical in gullible's travels mode.You will wish it had a more thundering climax, even if it is actually a touch clever, and credibility is often stretched to breaking point, but Malice operates out of the upper echelons of 1990s thrillers and still remains entertaining today. 7/10