Palmetto

Director: Volker Schlvndorff
Cast:
Woody Harrelson
Elisabeth Shue
Gina Gershon
Angela Featherstone
Laird Stuart

Another sad entrant in the Almost But Not Really contest for funny psychological thriller mysteries, "Palmetto" is proving exactly how hard it is for screenwriters to come up with another "Usual Suspects." Woody Harrelson plays Harry Barber, an ex-journalist just out of prison, who gets duped into making a ransom call for the seductress Elizabeth Shue. Apparently she wants him to call her dying husband and demand half a million for her stepdaughter, the equally seductive Chloe Sevigny (whom you might remember from "Kids")—but guess what? Nobody is quite who they seem to be, and before you know it, Harry's got a dead body in his car, and as Ricky Ricardo said, "some 'splainin' to do."

At times violently cruel, at other times violently slapstick, "Palmetto" never decided what kind of movie it wanted to be, and ended up being none of them. The performances are the stuff of amateurs, everyone caught in the act of desperate turd-polishing. Woody seems to have two characters in movies, the deranged psycho of "Wag the Dog" and "Natural Born Killers"—and the drifty cluelessness of his role on "Cheers." He's kinda both here, and faxes in most of it.

And Elizabeth Shue wanders around the movie in a semi-pathological, pheremonal haze, sticking out various parts of her erogenous zones in a baboon-like estrus. By the time she gets what's coming to her, you wonder how the hell she ever bought groceries. Wait for the rental, folks.

—Ian Williams

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