Reformed rebel director Dennis Hopper's neo-noir thriller is something of an anachronism: a fairly typical example of the genre updated with oral sex and graphic gunshot wounds. Heartthrob Don Johnson plays the usual drifter, wandering into a small Texas town and finding himself pulled in one direction by the lovely Jennifer Connelly and pushed in another by sultry nymphomaniac Virginia Madsen. The script wants to show the age-old conflict between good and evil, but it's a hard sell, especially when even the supposedly virtuous Connelly comes across like a sexpot fashion model. Likewise the entire film adds up to little more than a lot of self-conscious posturing, and with so many plot twists borrowed from so many other (better) film noirs this example limps on at least twenty minutes too long before the anti-climactic ending.
Review of The Hot Spot
