Film Review: Mike's Murder (1984)

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Experienced cinephiles rarely start watching a film while expecting one thing only to end up watching something completely different. Such situations often result in unpleasant surprises and one of them awaits viewers of Mike’s Murder, 1984 crime drama written, directed and produced by James Bridges.

Protagonist (although such term must be used with a grain of salt in the context of this film), played by Debra Winger, is Betty Parrish, Los Angeles bank teller who begins passionate affair with her tennis instructor Mike Chuhutsky (played by Mark Keyloun). The affair is brief and Mike disappears, only to reappear months later and explain that he supplements his income as a drug dealer. Betty nevertheless agrees to go on a date with him, but she gets stood up. It turns out that at the same evening Mike and his friend Pete (played by Darrell Larsson) were involved in major drug deal during which they decided to steal from their business partners. They reacted by having Mike brutally murdered few hours later. Betty is devastated when she learns about it next morning, but she nevertheless tries to find out what actually happened. Her quest leads her to Mike’s friends and acquaintances and she learns how Mike was involved in dark underbelly of Los Angeles, which involved drug dealing and male prostitution.

Judging by the names involved, audience and critics had reasons to expect at least half-decent and well-acted thriller with “noirish” plot about sex, drugs and corruption within the capital of American entertainment industry. What the everyone actually gets is slow, boring drama about bad things happening to dislikable people nobody should actually care about. Debra Winger, one of the most formidable actresses of 1980s Hollywood, is simply wasted in the role of character who is actually not that different from the audience; Betty is incredibly passive, she doesn’t do anything remarkable in the film and even her crusade to find out the truth about murdered lover is utterly pointless, because she makes it very unlikely that she would find his killers or avenge his death. She, being completely clueless about Mike’s life choices and his parallel career, doesn’t even register as someone particularly noteworthy for gangsters who simply leave her alone. The only scene where Betty is in danger happens at the very end and it is resolved in utterly annoying and unconvincing deus ex machina.

Bridges makes things even worse by his pedestrian and uninspired direction, which makes each of the scenes overlong and unpleasantly dark. Even the music by John Barry sounds pretentious and annoying. There are some scenes that are somewhat tolerable, mostly due to good cast. Paul Winfield, known for his prolific filmography as character actor, plays decadent record producer which was one of the rare opportunity to portray character with the same sexual orientation as Winfield in real life. William Ostrander leaves good impression as his manservant, while Larsson does slightly decent job as coked-up and paranoid small time criminal. Mark Keyloun, on the other hand, lacks any charisma and chemistry with Winger, which makes the romantic subplot utterly unconvincing. Some critics tried to explain this mess with Bridges’ original idea to show plot through non-linear narration (in style of Memento) and the studios insisting on conventional film; the others tried to explain this with the plot dealing with rampant cocaine abuse being too close at home for major players of early 1980s Hollywood. We’ll never know whether Mike’s Murder was neo-noir masterpiece butchered by studio executives or simply a bad film that couldn’t have been rescued with any clever creative trick.

RATING: 3/10 (+)