V.I. Warshawski (1991)

Victoria "V.I" Warshawski is a Chicago based private detective who agrees to babysit for her new boyfriend; then he is murdered. Being the detective type, she makes the murder her next case. In doing so she befriends the victim's daughter, Kat, and together they set out to crack the case.

Viewed this movie on 11/20/04, and it was so entertaining that it kept me up until two in the morning. My wife, who has markedly different tastes than I do, liked it enough to stay up with me. Imagine my surprise when I went to Maltin to look up a character, and found it classed as a BOMB. He panned it as wretchedly scripted, directed and photographed. To the contrary, I found the script to be easily followed, something that is getting more and more rare in this age of obscure scripts. If it was poorly directed, the actors are geniuses, becaust the scenes hung together well, were understandable and seemed completely natural, even though the story line was a bit picaresque. The photography was certainly adequate to tell the story without intruding on it.

Maltin and I may have seen different movies, because his plot summary spoke of a murdered hockey player, and without betraying too much of the plot, there were plenty of murders but no hockey player in the movie I saw. The plot in the movie I saw was delightfully complex, with a number of twists and turns that would have done O'Henry proud. All in all, it was two hours well spent.