The Thomas Crown Affair
Romancing the Bond, but with many more twists and turns for the drama. The decadence is too over the top, the private equity job too disgusting, and Dennis Leary is not pissed off enough at all these upper class twits.
Imagine if Patrick Bateman was alive inside, looked like Pierce Brosnan, had hobbies, and went to therapy. My suspension of disbelief cannot stretch so far, but let’s roll with it.
A big hobby of his is Impressionist paintings. He visits the museum so often, the minders even know him already. You would think we went there to look at beauty after spending the day gutting another manufacturing company and shipping all jobs to China (see The Company Men for the other side). But he has many more hobbies, can cook, etc etc etc. He’s a private sector James Bond.
After he steals the most expensive painting from the museum by hiring a bunch of crooks to smuggle themselves inside a Etruscan horse and provide a distraction, the authorities are onto him.
By authorities, I mean Dennis Leary as divorced detective tired of all this crap, and Rene Russo as an insurance actuary or something, investigating foul play in art thefts. She is extremely sexualized, it almost reaches parody levels, the detective sees garters before the rest of her body and face.
She takes the lead by going straight to his face and accusing him of being a thief, which she parlays into a date. The cop is pissed at this, and gets completely humiliated several times by the rich and powerful.
The actuary gets a date in the museum, and dinner at Dorsia, in which she steals his keys, makes copies, and recovers the painting. But it’s all a ruse, he replaced it with with a copy painted over dogs playing poker.
She does not give up that easily, and strings him up even more, turning into a petite romance, barrel-rolling a glider, a couple days in a Martinique house on a hill, the works. The cops warns her she is the one being played, and it seems so.
Then the twists appear: he is spotted with a statuesque girl much younger than her, she gets all jealous and brushes him off. They had decided to run away, he would pay her fee twice over to let him have the painting, all would end well. The girl ruins it!
Then the meta twists. He “lies” and says he wants to run away with her, the girl is another matter. He says he will give up the painting so they are together, but she is too hurt, and call the cops on him as he is giving the painting up.
Alas, this was a ruse within a ruse. The painting was in its place all along, with another painting painted over it. He gave up one of his to the same spot. He hired a bunch of people dressed like Magritte’s “man with bowler hat with apple in front of face” to roam the museum. The girl was actually his guardian, daughter of a famous forger jailed a while back.
She understands he was telling the truth, and can still flee with him. The cop sees through her, but lets her go. But he was not there, only the painting she said she preferred personally!
She feels terrible, and goes back home, but he’s in the back row, trying to speak with Scottish accent. All ends well.
All along this, Faye Dunaway is laughing her ass off, as the psychiatrist to the middle age billionaire manchild.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.