On M List of Movie Reviews
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The Morning After (1986)
Rate:
6
Viewed:
10/14
10/14:
There's little mystery going on in The Morning After with a lot of fillers in between.
Jane Fonda haters will surely be disgusted by the excessive amount of her screen time. It's so obvious that she was angling
for another Oscar win by virtue of her overdone performance. Eventually, Jane Fonda lost out to
Children of a Lesser God's Marlee Matlin because the Academy is a sucker for alcoholics, hookers, boxers, and people
with disabilities. Worse, I don't care for her washed-up alcoholic character.
I had high expectations for the film because of Sidney Lumet and Jeff Bridges. Yet it
doesn't feel like the former's picture and the latter has been mostly relegated to a supporting role with minimal impact
although Raúl Juliá isn't bad playing the husband. Hence, you're better off watching
Jagged Edge, a neo-noir thriller that was released a year earlier.
If you notice how small the cast is, the whodunnit mystery isn't hard to figure out because it's pretty much down
to two suspects and one of them can be safely ruled out if some logic will be applied. Because not much of time is spent on the
mystery, it's hastily wrapped up with a nice bow-tie in an implausible manner which seems the result of a last-minute creative
spark. Technically speaking, the movie is twelve minutes too long because of Jeff Bridges' all-too-familiar
ready-to-die smile just like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and
Starman.
All in all, Sidney Lumet should've expanded the mystery plot and got rid of Jane Fonda.