Half-assed Street! (Half Moon Street (DVD))

Member Name: pmcds

Product:	Half Moon Street (DVD)
Date:	11/06/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Harmless enough

Disadvantages: Just plods along, a bit boring, really

Half Moon Street is a 1986 thriller with a slight erotic twist. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine, it promises on first glance to be convincing and attractive in its presentation, and entertaining in its plot and acting.

However, if ever there was a film that you could describe as being distinctly average, this is it! Weaver stars as Dr Lauren Slaughter, disheartened with her political role in the Middle East Office, as well as the low pay it gives her, and so she follows up a mysterious video and becomes the latest employee of an escort service.

Soon, she meets up with Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine), and their paths cross on a regular basis, at times deliberate, and at others purely by chance. This develops into somewhat of a romance, albeit rather haphazard and unconvincing, and provides a bit of a distraction to the political unrest and the job trip to Kuwait that she has been waiting to land in her lap.

The idea of the film is quite clever: Lord Bulbeck enlists the services of an escort to relieve the pressure of dealing with political unrest. This develops into a romance, and the lines between the two become blurred, as Slaughter leads Bulbeck into her volatile world in Half Moon Street.

However, it just doesn't deliver. There is nothing sinister, or even really romantic about a lot of the film, and we are never sure what relevance each of the two storylines have, and which one, if indeed either of them, is the main point of the film. No doubt there is something in this, as a couple of Slaughter's 'clients' have political ties.

Indeed, I felt as if the film was trying to recreate some of the more high profile political scandals involving escorts, such as The Profumo Affair of the 1960s. It had that kind of ring to it, although this didn't really work very well. I found myself not just confused through the film, but also rather nonplussed by most of it. My initial statement about it being distinctly average goes pretty much for the entire film, with nothing really standing out.

The plot canters along at a languid pace, pausing every now and then for Weaver to show us mroe and mroe flesh. I don't think I have ever seen her naked in a film before, and was quite surprised at how regularly this happened, here. In this respect, it seemed weird, but throw Michael Caine into the equation with the nudity (although blessedly we see very little of him without his clothes on) and you have something with even more strange events than you would first think.

I got the DVD free with a national newspaper, and as a result it has no extras on it whatsoever. I won't be watching this one again, though. It was a rather boring and predictable film, if I am honest, and not even Weaver and Caine's presence could bring it to the boil. A mediochre film indeed.

Summary: Don't worry if you end up missing this!