Don't spend your cash on 'Hard Cash'

The vast majority of movies I watch, I come to cold. If I know anything about them, it comes from reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case, or, rarely, a review on another website or a preview on the DVD itself, which I sometimes watch to decide if I'm actually in the mood for the film in question.

Such was the case with "Hard Cash". I'm a fan of Christian Slater, and I am of course familiar with Val Kilmer and Daryl Hannah, but I knew nothing about the film itself. So, after it sat about a month in my review stack, I stuck it in the DVD player to, at the very least, watch any preview of it that might be included.

And I decided that I had to watch the movie right then, because any flick that's got a midget assassin hiding in a toilet bowl can't be all bad (particularly when it's the midget who played Mini-Me).

But, unfortunately, the midget assassin in the toilet was merely indicative of the turd that this movie turned out to be... and I had been suckered by a well-done promo.


Hard Cash (aka "Run for the Money") (2002)
Starring: Christian Slater, Val Kilmer, Sara Downing and Daryl Hannah
Director: Peter Antonijevic
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

Thomas (Slater), a clever thief working with a gang of morons who manage to pull off a $1.9 million heist. All Thomas wants is to split the money with his partners and flee to lead a better life with his young daughter and girlfriend (Downing). Unfortunately, Thomas and his gang stole marked money that a crooked, mildly insane FBI agent (Kilmer) had already stolen and was having laundered. Now, Thomas has to pull off an impossible job at the behest of the crooked Fed while trying to keep his own criminal associates from killing him and each other.


I love a good heist movie, I love good action films, I love good crime dramas, and I love good comedies. "Hard Cash", a film with a case of severe attention deficit disorder, tries to be all of the above, but fails to be any of the above. It reminded me of a pale imitation of a Donald Westlake novel, except the jokes weren't all that funny and the stakes didn't seem to higher... only more unbelievable and stupid. Worse, the stunts and chases aren't particularly good (and obviously cheaply made... the filmmakers couldn't even bother to make most of the cars they demolished look like anything but the junkers they were) and the heists weren't very suspenseful. In fact, "Hard Cash" does a great job at remaining 100% Tension Free. (In fact, the "teaser heist" at the very beginning of the movie is more interesting than anything that follows.)

The only halfway decent thing about this film is Christian Slater and the character he plays--even Val Kilmer can quite manage to rise above the awful script and character he has to work with. Slater's character is the only one with even the slightest bit of depth in the film, and he is the only one who seems to be doing any acting. (Okay, so he's the same character he is in most movies he's done--he's Christian Slater!--but at least there's SOME range of emotion in his performance. No one else has that.

Save your hard-earned cash for something better than "Hard Cash".

One of the best movies of 2000s

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)
Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan
Director: Shane Black
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

In "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," petty thief Harry (Downey) is whisked away to Hollywood when a casting director decides he'll be perfect to play a detective in an upcoming movie. Here, he meets homosexual private detective "Gay" Perry (Kilmer) and, through a chance encounter, is reunited with childhood friend and unfulfilled dream-girl Harmony (Monaghan). The trio soon find themselves (despite their best efforts not to be) involved with mysteries, murders, and mayhem so bizarre that it's as though they've stepped into a classic pulp dime store mystery novel.


"Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" manages to be both a black comedy and a modern take on "film noir," as our reluctant heroes try to sort out the evermore complicated and deadly mystery they have been drawn into. The humor is derived from extremely witty patter that is delivered with great skill by Downey and Kilmer, and from the movie's playful fourth-wall approach to the ever-present narrator so common in this type of film. (More than once, the narrator--Harry--stops the film and comments that he left something and then goes on hilarious, self-deprecating rants about narration, storytelling, and how bad he is at both.) Laughs are also generated by the way the film turns several of the genre's conventions on its head, prime among these being that the hardboiled detective is openly gay.

This movie is fantastic not only because every actor is at the top of their game for every moment they spend on screen, but also because the film manages to keep its tense mystery plot going while being playful with the artifact that is a movie and the narration device. Even the digs at the "typical Hollywood happy ending" that the film gets in at the end, and the final wrap-up by the narrator are executed so flawlessly that they actually work!

Pay attention, all you filmmakers who think you're making clever suspense movies or clever comedies about movie-making and Hollywood... "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is an incredibly well-done example of how to do both.