This Could Have Been a Great Movie!

This whole movie is ruined by Madonna.

If they had cast an actress in the lead role (instead of a singer who can't act and also can't sing), this could have been one of the best crime movies of the 90s.

I really disagree with all the people who say this is a dumb story that is badly written and all that.

The direction is good, the dialog is excellent, and it has a load of truly great actors (with Willem Dafoe somehow looking younger than he did years earlier in To Live and Die In L.A.).


The problem is the casting of Madonna in the lead role. It isn't just that she isn't a good actor, it transcends that; it sounds like a wooden reading from a person who isn't trying to act and doesn't understand what they are reading or where the emphasis goes (see Keanu Reeves). It isn't just that Madonna can't act, either. If she were the greatest actress of all time, this movie still would not work. Madonna wasn't NEARLY young enough or beautiful enough to be the femme fatale here. Be serious, any toothpaste commercial has three women who are prettier than she is. Worse, the (presumably homely) wife who loses her husband to this serial homewrecker/murderer is played by Julianne Moore, who, at the time this was made, was approximately 800,000 times better looking than Madonna!

The obvious comeback to this from Madonna fans is that Madonna didn't have to be flawlessly physically the most beautiful woman in the world, that she was really hot at the time because of some trashy coffee table book that nobody bought, but uh-uh, I don't buy into that at all, not whatsoever. Films should be timeless. For example, making a movie right now in 2009 starring non-actor Jon Gosselin as a stud ladies man because he is hot in the media right now would be ludicrous, no woman in her right mind would even look at that guy twice, much less be seduced by him.

I just watched The Landlord (1970). Talk about dated, every issue touched on in the movie is all but irrelevant now and really speaks only to the times (the end of the 60s), but still, that film is a masterpiece all the way around, enthralling to watch, and it teleports you back to that time and place for two hours. That is just like a WWII movie, it takes you back there, you don't have to be physically frightened by the Nazis today in order to feel the movie.

Usually a great acting performance can only come from two or more great actors reacting off each other in a scene, a bad one simply can't be in the mix, but not so here, Willem Dafoe does amazing acting in great scenes against a female lead who might as well be a cardboard box.

A bizarre twist here is that she kept at this unthinkable movie career even after this dog and Shanghai Surprise (which singlehandedly defined bad cinema) and, years later, did Evita, a movie in which her acting was pretty good and her singing was great. I got roped into seeing it and was amazing.

Anyhow, the casting of Madonna in the lead role skews the entire production into the "what were they thinking" zone. It pulls the whole thing into the trash.

As a cop/legal drama, this is actually very good, and fairly accurate. The only glaring flaw I saw in it was when Joe Mantegna starts doing the opening statement for the trial. I was puzzled thinking, "Why is the police detective doing the opening?", only to realize that it was the other way around, that he was the prosecuting attorney.

In 999 out of 1,000 real cases, the DA doesn't interrogate the suspects nor go to the crime scene when a dead body is found. The police department does all that.

In serious cases that are sure to lead to a lengthy trial, it is common for the DA to have meetings with the police detectives to review statements and evidence, but in most cases, the DA has never even met the detectives before the trial, they only read their reports.

Once in the courtroom, it was pretty good. It was particularly effective how Dafoe took the female witness, who appeared rock solid, and proved that her testimony was fake for several reasons, making her into such an obvious liar/fraud that it made the whole case look like a lynching.

This is exactly what happened in real life the same year when Johnnie Cochran outed detective Mark Fuhrman as a racist, spiking the whole OJ case with poison, when Fuhrman actually had almost nothing to do with the case; If they had suppressed the bloody glove, it would have severed Fuhrman from the case entirely, and the massive, overwhelming preponderance of other evidence against him would have been enough for a conviction under normal circumstances (i.e., when they have real attorneys prosecuting the case, not some guy who is dying of a bad heart, a dingbat who can't even pay attention, and a guy who styled himself as some kind of sex symbol and went off on a promotional tour after losing the trial for the people of the state of California).

The opening scenes were a little weak, but otherwise it would have been a great film without Madonna.

The people who criticize this as being just a copy of Basic Instinct are totally correct. It was exactly the same story that uses the same mechanics throughout.

Basic Instinct was a better movie only for the single reason I outlined above; Sharon Stone was a good actress with the beauty and wits to really corrupt someone.

Otherwise, Body of Evidence would have been a much better movie. Willem Dafoe is twice the actor Michael Douglas will ever be, and there was no one in Basic Instinct that has the acting skills of Joe Mantegna.

I really miss the days when I could enjoy the acting of Joe Mantegna. Oh sure, he still acts, and does his best in Criminal Minds, but his drama is unintentionally comical when all I hear is the voice of Fat Tony from The Simpsons...