'Malice' of no thought

A young woman bicycles down quiet New England streets, on her way home after a long day of studying at the university. Upon entering her home, the woman finds her cat, her chair, and a strange man who proceeds to rape and beat her. This shocking scene opens Malice, a ludicrous "twist-and-turn-and-twist" thriller that stretches believability to new, ridiculous lengths.

Without giving too much away (the film completely hinges on "surprise twists"), the film centers on Andy Safian (Bill Pullman), a dean at a New England women's university; his wife, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), a hospital volunteer; and Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin), a brilliant surgeon and high school acquaintance of Andy's who moves in with the Safians. While a serial rapist stalks women at the university (a plotline that turns out to have no significance whatsoever), Jed's presence in the Safians' lives plunge them into a "web of intrigue" where nothing is as it seems.

Malice's problems are all-encompassing, but the faults ultimately start at Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank's screenplay. To the script's credit, the story takes quite a number of twists, but the twists really strain credibility. Sorkin and Frank shove many hard-to-swallow implausibilities and plot inconsistencies down the throats of the audience, particularly an absurdly masochistic act of self-mutilation crucial to the plot. It's one thing to create a thriller that twists and turns; it's a whole other thing entirely to create a thriller that takes believable and logical twists and turns. In Malice, the script seems to twist for the sake of twisting, not necessarily paying attention to the logic behind the twists. Director Harold Becker manages to inject some suspense into the finished product, but not even his filmmaking talent can clear up the cloudy logic of the script.

It doesn't help that the main player in Malice are embarrassingly bad. Contrary to what the commercials and print ads lead you to believe, the star of the film is Pullman, who isn't an expressive or interesting enough actor to carry a film. He excels as a character actor, often stealing scenes in that capacity like he did in Sleepless in Seattle. The leading lady, Kidman, is laughable, hilariously overacting in the film's second half. Unconvincing and way off the mark, she is very miscast. Two supporting players are the only bright spots in this otherwise awful film: Baldwin, impressively portraying a slick egotist, which he played superbly in last year's Glengarry Glen Ross and Bebe Neuwirth, who, despite an ever-changing pseudo-New England accent, credibly plays a police detective.

After watching Malice I felt like revealing the film's big secret to the incoming audience. It's a frustrating and infuriating film, one that really makes you feel cheated once it's over. Baldwin, Kidman, Pullman, screenwriters Sorkin (A Few Good Men) and Frank (Dead Again), and director Becker (Sea of Love) have all done better than this.