Rough Magic (1997)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written by Robert Mundi, William Brookfield, and Clare Peploe, based on the novel Miss Shumway Waves a Wand by James Hadley Chase
Directed by Clare Peploe
Starring Russell Crowe, Bridget Fonda, Jim Broadbent, D.W. Moffett, and Kenneth Mars

Features:

• Trailers
  

My Advice: Rent it

Myra (Fonda) is a beautiful magician's assistant. I mean that she's the one that's beautiful, not the magician. She's engaged to marry up and coming politico Cliff Wyatt (Moffett), who's more interested in helping his political career than he is about her. Anyway, one night after her magic act, the magician (Mars) is trying to scare Wyatt away from Myra--but in the process the magician gets killed and Myra captures it all on film. She finally sees Wyatt's true colors, so she bolts with the film and heads to Mexico in search of an ancient Mayan medicine woman. In Mexico she crosses paths with a "snake oil" salesman named Doc Ansell (Broadbent) and a flatfoot detective named Alec Ross (Crowe). After running around Mexico for a while, they finally team up to go find this medicine woman and the secret potion for a healing elixir that she has knowledge of.

Sound complicated enough? Well, it's not really, I guess, but it's just that there's two seemingly disconnected plots at work here, and they don't really tie up until towards the very end of the movie. The only thing this flick has going for it is that you get to watch two Academy Award Winning Actors^© go at a mediocre script toward the beginning of their careers. The movie really has no redeeming qualities other than that. It's slow to get moving and once it gets going, they payoff is really not worth the wait.

The DVD is loaded with no special features whatsoever. There are a couple of trailers for other movies, but I guess they didn't even feel that this film was worthy of having its own trailer listed with the others. There is no director's commentary and it seems that they couldn't get the actors together to do any interviews about this film that resides in their pasts (and I'm now helping to remind people of). Don't lose a lot of sleep over this one. It's really just not worthy of having a lot of special features to go along with it. I mean, it's not even widescreen, for crying out loud. The fact that it's presented full-frame shows how much regard is paid this project.

In conclusion, though, I have to say that there is only one tiny little thing that puts this one on the rental list rather than the skip it list: there is a shot at the end of the movie that I swear has to be the only time this image is used in the legitimate cinema. For the sake of not spoiling it, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I will say that even as the last image that you see before the credits roll, it has the power to take you completely out of the movie. It must be rented just to see what some directors will try to put in films.