Jade

This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Directing from a script by Joe Eszterhas, William Friedkin brings a professional air to a trashy erotic-thriller that’s not that trashy nor that erotic. It’s mostly just kind of dull. I don’t think Friedkin had ever directed anything sexy before, and there’s a surprisingly sterile quality to the erotic elements here. But, the real sin is that the plotting makes just this side of no sense, the characters barely exist, and the overall mystery never comes into focus.

Kyle Medford, a millionaire, is murdered at his home in San Francisco, and the assistant district attorney David Corelli (David Caruso) is assigned the case. I should note that there’s a weird tendency here shared with Rampage where it feels like assistant DAs in Friedkin films are plainclothes policemen instead of attorneys, joining in on first pass moves into a crime scene. Well, at least this has the restraint to not have the ADA be part of a forced incursion. Anyway, the crime scene is pretty straight forward, to be honest, when you step back and just look at the details. There’s a murder weapon that has one set of prints on it. There’s one person who was known to have been with him that evening. What does Corelli do? He takes unrelated pictures of the governor of California (Richard Crenna) having sex with an unidentified woman to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, immediately gets a face to face meeting without telling anyone what he’s carrying, and shows the pictures to the governor for…seemingly no reason at all.

You’d think that an ADA given the directive of managing a case of a murder would go in the most obvious direction for the investigation. Instead, he goes rogue to talk to the governor for really mysterious reasons that never, ever get explained. I don’t think he has a reason. I mean, if Corelli was some sort of highly ambitious guy who was trying to blackmail the governor in order to secure a future post in the state government, that’d make sense. Maybe there’s some material on the cutting room floor, excised to make him more likeable.

With that tangent mostly out of the way for the moment, the focus turns to Corelli’s friend Matt (Chazz Palminteri) and Matt’s wife Anna (Linda Fiorentino). Anna is the one with the fingerprints on the murder weapon, but there’s this heavy resistance against bringing charges against her, not because she’s connected to Matt who is a high-powered defense attorney, but because they don’t have a motive. Seriously, David’s boss says this at some point.

The investigation, if you want to call it that, ends up zeroing in a beachside house they call the Pacifica House where they find hidden cameras in the bedroom as well as a connection to Patrice (Angie Everhart), the woman in the picture with the governor. So much focus is put on this house and its use as a pad for men to have trysts with anonymous women that you’d think it’d be key to the whole “who killed the millionaire at the beginning of the movie” thing, but that central mystery is pretty much forgotten by this point. Seriously, this is just random nonsense.

People start dying, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Anna is at the center of it all, especially when they discover a burnt video, partially restored, of Anna playing the part of the eponymous Jade, a sexually active woman who encounters with strange men in the Pacifica House. Surely she’s…responsible for the killing of the millionaire now? Even though her prints were on the murder weapon from the beginning. I really get the sense that Eszterhas was very modified by illicit substances when he wrote this.

I mean, we have our central mystery that gets completely forgotten. And then we have the actual focus of the film which is illicit but not a murder investigation at all (send in the Vice squad up against the governor of California, I guess). At the center of it is this weird little triangle of David, Anna, and Matt. David supposedly loved Anna before she married Matt, but this undercurrent is so underdeveloped that it doesn’t seem to matter. I mean, they could be complete strangers, and he could just consider her attractive and that would be enough for how much the movie puts into this.

I’m not sure if I’m being completely fair to Eszterhas, though. This does feel like a much larger script cut down to the bone to get it under 100 minutes. The connection with the governor is underdeveloped. The focus on the Pacifica House never gets the proper explanation within the context of the investigation that starts everything. The actual duality around Anna and Jade is underdone, but it feels like it should be the focus while it’s given so little time to actually take root. Maybe the script was 200 pages long? I dunno, but whether it was 200 pages or 100, Friedkin took the job and did what he could, I guess. He seems disengaged. It’s professional, but just dull.

I should also note the acting. Caruso gets all the ridicule because he tried to make his jump from television to film with this, and it’s a monumental failure (especially financially, making back less than a fifth of its budget). I didn’t hate him in it. He’s fine as an actor, but the script simply doesn’t support him. The person who should get the ridicule is Fiorentino who is so unconvincing, especially when she’s supposed to be a professional woman, that it’s amazing she got past the first round of auditions.

At least Friedkin knew how to frame a shot through it all, though. It’s nice that the nonsense was in focus and well-composed as it played out.

Rating: 1/4