Bulletproof Heart

I've searched for a copy of this movie on DVD in stores, on-line for 10 years and finally located a VHS copy from Amazon.

I truly do NOT understand why this movie isn't listed in Mimi Roger's or Anthony Lapaglia's Wikis as I regard it as their best work. I plan to copy the VHS to DVD ands share it on torrent sites.

No one else seems to give a flip about marketing it on DVD or I'd have ordered it by now.

Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

There's your ten lines, Bubba.

Bulletproof Heart (1994)

This wears its film noir visuals on its sleeve and even there, in the one clear intention by the filmmakers, it holds back. For one reason, it's in color, but not the noir intense color you might expect in a modern iteration, but a dull and workaday visual approach with grey blacks and soft edges. Too bad, because the visuals were the one hope for making this thing work.

The idea is promising--a woman knows she is going to be killed by a hired killer, and she seduces the killer(s) and avoids her death, at least at first (not to give away the end). But that is the entire plot idea, totally, so for an hour and a half we slowly (slowly) get there. There is a lot of "soft porn" as we go, and not very good either (not advancing the plot and not for its own sake, whatever soft porn is supposed to be doing in a movie in the first place). The script has shades of the clipped dialog and indifference lead character of noir, but maybe the comparison to great films of the past isn't helping appreciate this one.

The director, Mark Malone, has a series of five star movies to his name (five out of ten) except his last one, which gets three. This is his first, and it feels like it, with some clumsy breaks in the narrative flow that feel like film school tricks. The writing is painful, the editing lazy.

There are better low budget crime and suspense films to cut your teeth on.

A Must See! Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Boyle and Matt Craven do a terrific job. However, it's Mimi Rogers outstanding and shocking performance of desperation, resignation, and the ability to play 'the game' on her terms using powerful emotion and sex, with the shady characters that makes this movie awesome. She does this from start to finish and you can be the judge if she's doing this out of necessity or out of pleasure, or "just to play the game". The plot is complete and has twists and turns. Originally it was released as "Bulletproof Heart". Great character study and human nature teeming with emotion in all the characters. The assassin, the old friend who's now a driver, will make you twitch while you watch this movie, and the Boss. The Boss who pushes the assassin to clean up his act with this new hit, since his last assassination was blotched up. It weaves together to create a super movie, you'll never forget!

How this sensational first feature failed to become a massive critical hit I am at a loss to understand. With just a few characters and a rudimentary plot, Mark Malone has fashioned a stare into the soul as bleak and uncompromising as anything since Last Tango in Paris. Lapaglia and Mimi Rogers make a heart-stopping duo thrust into a situation so replete with irony that it is almost Shakespearean. And to continue the theatrical reference, Malone uses Brechtian chapter titles to distance the audience and make the whole tragedy bearable. Finally under no circumstances should audiences miss the post-credit sequence (at the end) which perfects a classic circular structure and monumentalises the work. 'Nuf said!

"The hit must be done tonight. The mark is expecting you, and won't resist." That was the set up, but hardly comes close to what confronts Anthony LaPaglia.

A lot of important crooks want Mimi Rogers dead. Why? No one really says, but we start to understand at her first appearance in this marvelous film: she's assertive, smart, stylish, educated, curious, and, yes, very sexy.

Almost a cast of two - others only serve to set up the characters or the plot - with Matt Craven as superb comic relief, the story slowly exposes the soul of the hit man and the real reason for the hit.

Marvelous work by all in the cast; especially Rogers and LaPaglia.

I saw this fifteen years ago; powerful remembrances made me search for it and watch it again today.