Colour
I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.
Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.
All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.
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