Film

Palmetto (1998)

Director: Volker Schlöndorff

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Somewhat embittered after spending two years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, journo Harry Barber (Harrelson) returns to his Florida hometown and his artist girlfriend Nina (Gershon) feeling the world owes him. So when an apparently chance meeting with millionaire's wife Rhea Malroux (Shue) leads to steamy sex and an offer of $50,000 in return for making a phonecall and a ransom pick-up in a bogus kidnap involving her stepdaughter Odette (Sevigny), he's not averse to the proposal. Trouble is, genre convention dictates that all Harry's precautions against becoming a fall guy are in vain, and soon he's up to his neck in trouble. Despite decent credentials (script from James Hadley Chase's Just Another Sucker), this is a banal contribution to that very variable modern subgenre, 'neo-noir'. For all the sweaty, fatalistic ambience and frequent, if predictable, narrative twists, it's finally just a string of hard-boiled clichés, churned out with insufficient conviction to succeed as a thriller and not enough irony to work as parody.

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