The Worst Film Ever

Beautiful, moving film.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Random Hearts (1999): Dir: Sydney Pollack / Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles S. Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dennis Haysbert: Advertised as a disaster film, romance, suspense, and drama. It fails on all accounts. It regards the reality of people coming together through circumstances beyond their control. Harrison Ford stars as a cop whose wife died in a plane crash. Kristen Scott Thomas plays a congresswoman whose husband died in the same crash. Could they have been having an affair? Are trees green in summer? It will surprise no one when they become romantically linked. Even their first sexual encounter in a car seems horribly cliché. Director Sidney Pollack does his best but the production looks drab. He previously directed Ford in Sabrina but this hardly matches his work in films such as Absence of Malice and Tootsie. Apparently Ford being a major box office draw isn't working for Pollack. Perhaps he should cast him in an action film, since he generally draws in those. Ford and Thomas cannot save this dreary film and seem to be coasting on star power only. Charles S. Dutton and Bonnie Hunt appear in flat supporting roles. Part of the problem is that the marketing doesn't know what the film is. The romance is bland at best and the thriller elements are a blink and miss variety. Cheap film with a cheap payoff only interested in a sigh from the audience. Many will sigh from impatience. Score: 2 / 10

Sydney Pollack kept a tight directorial rein on his stars and his cast in Random Hearts. As a result you get a romantic film both tender and expressive in their faces. Good thing that Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas have faces that the camera loves.They are the most unlikeliest of lovers. The only other way that these two would meet is if Washington, DC cop Ford was ever assigned to a security detail Representative Thomas. Unlikely as Ford's assignment is Internal Affairs. But somewhere their spouses Susanna Thompson and Peter Coyote did meet. In fact they've been meeting regularly for some time now.It all comes to light when the two are killed in a plane crash that goes down in the Potomac River. As one of them is traveling under an assumed name and the other lied about her destination it does take someone with the mind of an investigator to track it down. Depending on your point of view of how fortunate for Ford that he is one.Both Ford and Thomas are dealing with other issues. Ford and his partner Charles Dutton have just busted Dennis Haysbert, a cop who was shaking down social club operators for protection money. In fact in a very interesting hostage scene Ford puts Haysbert in custody. You have to see the film alone for how he handles that.As for Thomas she's facing a multi-millionaire opponent for her seat which is one of the two in New Hampshire. Not really a good time for dirty laundry to be aired. We never see her opponent, but he's one of those family values types so we know exactly what she can expect.Still these two become a comfort to each other and soon enough become quite a bit more. How their worlds eventually publicly intersect is for you to see Random Hearts.In a modern urban setting Random Hearts is a love story, the kind that Hollywood used to do so well. Bid kudos to Sydney Pollack and his stars and cast for delivering on this one.

Okay, Billy Wilder got their first with Avanti in which Jack Lemmon and Juliette Mills journey to Ischia to claim the respective bodies of his father and her mother who have been killed in a road accident, only to discover that they have been meeting on the island for years clandestinely. They start out as antagonists and end up in the sack, natch. Here Sydney Pollack puts a little spin on it inasmuch as Ford and Scott Thomas are not on a vacation island thousands of miles from home when - in this case - their spouses rather than parents - fail to survive a plane crash. Pollack also allows us to see both Ford and Scott Thomas at work whereas Lemmon on Mills had left their day jobs behind. Still there are enough similarities for plagiarism to rear its ugly head, so what else is knew. This eluded me on release and I found a Russian version in a Thrift Shop, recognized Scott Thomas on the box, know she always delivers so took it home. I was pleasantly surprised, especially after reading the first few pans here on IMDb. Scott Thomas was good as ever and a tad warmer than she often plays and works well with Ford who probably was, as someone remarked, a touch old for the role. Overall I enjoyed it and may well give it another whirl in a year or so.

With a story like this, maybe it couldn't have been paced well anyway. But Random Hearts is like a glossy, stillborn mess that just sort of sits there and waits for you to decide when to turn the channel. Normally the late Sydney Pollack brought a lot more to his films, but here he must have thought star power could be enough. The story is implausible at best, and maybe just a step ahead of ludicrous. Tough Internal Affairs cop and female congressman from New Hampshire lose their spouses in a plane crash. The congresswoman wants to forget the whole thing and move on, but the inquisitive nature of the cop keeps him searching for answers. Finally, after the viewer has long since lost interest in the movie, the two begin an affair as hard to believe as Ted Danson and Whoopie Goldberg. There is WAY too much time dedicated to a subplot involving crooked cops, and this whole angle should have been written out. The whole thing plays out very, very slowly.The acting is good enough, and it is the film's only saving grace. Ford is dour and reserved as the grizzled cop. Thomas is believable and even likable as the politician whose biggest care seems to be if she should run for office again or not. She seems at peace instantly when she learns of her husband's death. The thought of these two having an affair together just isn't plausible, though. No way. It would be easier to take if the film didn't waste so much time with its subplots and parsed dialog. Pollack tries to use similar music to what he used in The Firm to liven things up, but this only makes us recall how much better that film was. And it was far from great. But that is the subject of another review perhaps some day.Was there a good way to tell such a contrived story? Not sure, but this film is a failure. In many ways, it began the downfall of Harrison Ford who has seen his career sag in recent years. Even though it was no classic, the last Indiana Jones film was the best work he's done in years. Random Hearts is essentially a waste of a good cast, director, and over two hours of your time. 4 of 10 stars.The Hound.