Rating of
2.5/4
Too Preoccupied with its Genre
SIngli6 - wrote on 08/11/12
The greatest quandary I face with 'Body Heat', along with many of the film's genre contemporaries, is the stratospheric level of genre evocation that the film employs. It may not suffer the same trappings of more recent noirs such as Michael Winterbottom's 'The Killer Inside Me' -- big-budget period reconstructions of film noir found in the candy sampler boxes of film genres; neo-noirs that stink of abecedarian cinephilia, void of life and individual identity; models displayed in the window fronts of cavernous department stores that are clean and neatly arranged, but lacking a personal touch -, but its studied academia toward the dialogue and staples of noir deny it an edge, indeed even a soupcon of spontaneity. The meditative pace can be relished, and the cinematography is generally aesthetically pleasing, but Kasdan has had about as much interest in making this film enthralling and suspenseful as William Hurt has had in being charismatic.
The film is a post-modern dissection of film noir, and it bally well knows it. This normally wouldn't be a problem, provided that the film marked it's pretensions with some type of metaphysical heaviness or Nietzschean gibberish to facilitate our consumption of it as 'high art'. None of this for 'Body Heat', though; it's perfectly content with anatomizing a genre without the necessary tools of intellectual justification. Admirable, yet stupid. 3/4 for the audacity of such an undertaking.
