Body heat clone

Nothing hurts a thriller more than when you really start to notice how the plot is going through the motions. “China Moon” is that type of film- one that’s consistently undone by a script that’s so attuned to plot mechanics that it’s really all we can see.

It details the love affair of Florida Detective Kyle Bodine (Ed Harris) and Rachel Munro (Madeleine Stowe), the wife of an industrialist (Charles Dance) who is cheating on his wife and may be a murder suspect in a case Kyle is working on. The husband also happens to be controlling and abusive to Rachel, and based on the fact she also knows he’s cheating, it doesn’t take much wondering to figure out why she’s buying an illegal gun. It’s also fairly easy to see how she’s expecting more than just romance from Kyle, a Detective usually good at spotting criminal mistakes, yet he can’t see the signs that Rachel is ready to do something rash.

A murder occurs and Kyle is given a choice to either turn her in or help cover it up. It’s here we’re supposed to remember the absurd logic of the title, which is said earlier by Harris that under a China Moon, strange things happen. Up to this point the film has been mostly derivative, yet as the title kicks in, I guess we’re supposed to blame the moon for the implausibility of the rest of it. Stowe has a lithe, elegantly unstable way about her and Harris is always charismatic, even as a dupe (and the film gives us a scene of nudity for them both) but the problem really starts when even their scenes of erotic passion are less about heat than they are about checking off a plot point.

That Kyle seems so naive is another big problem and it’s hard to be surprised about the suspicious things we learn about Rachel either. “China Moon” has the consistent problems of either trying to be just like 1981’s “Body Heat” or trying to prove it’s as smart as it. On the first count it succeeds only in being a flimsy copy, and on the second, there are such left field twists here as to make a body crooked. It’s hardly ever as suspenseful as it thinks it is but I give it credit for the ending, something this bittersweet shows balls. The rest of it doesn’t show very much we haven’t seen before.