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Good movie but grossly overrated

Excellent but underrated film

A different way of telling a story

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher) returns home for his mother's marriage. Michael had left town due to his gambling addiction. His wife Rachel (Alison Elliott) was forced to deal with the fallout. His mother's new husband gets him a job as an armored car driver. He reconnects with his now ex-wife. Her boyfriend Tommy Dundee (William Fichtner) spies them making out. Tommy is angrily possessive and Rachel wants to escape. Michael gets pulled into a robbery of the armor truck.The flashbacks are mostly a waste of time. The color saturation is an attempt at art-house. The basis of this is the film noir crime drama. Soderbergh does it as a character study at first. I keep comparing this to Blood Simple (1984) where new filmmakers Coen brothers try their hands at noir crime drama. They were able to work the style successfully whereas Soderbergh seems more interested in working around the genre. As a whole, the movie lacks the needed tension and the characters are not that compelling to me.

Steven Soderbergh's highly enjoyable remake of the 1949 film noir "Criss Cross" is a story about a group of characters whose interactions have a critical bearing on the outcome of a planned heist. The deceptions, betrayals and double-crosses involved complicate the already tense relationships between them and provide the basis for a variety of plot twists that ensure that the action never gets dull. The presence of a non-linear narrative, dramatic close-ups and shots within which the main protagonist is seen framed within a confined area, are all faithful to the classic film noir style and the inclusion of some strong colour sequences, not only identifies the time spans being depicted but also contributes to the movie's off-beat atmosphere.In "The Underneath" an apathetic drifter whose life has no orthodox focus finds that the resultant void within him is occupied by his most powerful obsessions and it's these obsessions that determine the directions that his life takes. Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher) was a compulsive gambler who, in the past, ran up enormous debts that led to him having to leave is home and wife in Austin, Texas. Some years later, after having squared up all his debts and given up gambling, he returns to his hometown to attend his widowed mother's wedding.Michael's return isn't welcomed by his brother David (Adam Trese), who's a police officer. He despises Michael for not being around when his mother needed him most and also for not turning up for his father's funeral. David is also secretly hooked on Michael's ex-wife Rachel (Alison Elliott) and is resentful because he anticipates that Michael will try to rekindle his relationship with her. Rachel, who is now involved with a local nightclub owner and small time gangster called Tommy Dundee (William Fichtner) is extremely bitter about the circumstances under which Michael left and the problems that she subsequently had to face alone.Michael's future stepfather Ed Dutton (Paul Dooley) helps him to get a job as a driver in the armoured car company where he's employed but Michael's attention soon becomes concentrated on getting back together with Rachel. She's initially hostile to any reconciliation but later gives Michael some encouragement and they meet in secret. On one of these occasions they're discovered together by Tommy who's an insanely jealous psychopath. In order to extricate himself from an extremely dangerous situation, Michael quickly invents a story about a proposal to steal a large consignment of money which is due to be transported by his company. Tommy agrees to take part in the robbery but things don't go according to plan and after the heist, the number of betrayals and twists that follow bring events to a surprising and fascinating conclusion.Peter Gallagher successfully conveys Michael's consistent indifference to the feelings and needs of those who are closest to him and also portrays his character's selfishness and self-destructive nature very effectively. Alison Elliott draws a clear distinction between Rachel's personality as it was before Michael's enforced departure and the more embittered person that she became later. The supporting cast are also very good with William Fichtner making a particularly strong impression as the extremely violent Tommy.

Everyone, including Soderbergh I guess, likes to beat this one up... First of all, there is no such thing as too much style for this genre... secondly, the only bad neo-noir is the one that doesn't get made (except for that Val Kilmer piece of crap, Salton Sea)... and finally, YORK peppermint patties rock...

Ex-con and recovered gambler Michael Chambers returns home to Austin, Texas to attend his mother's wedding. He looks up the girlfriend that he walked out on many years prior, immediately causing problems with her criminally-inclined boyfriend. When his new father-in-law helps him get set up with a job driving an armoured car, things begin to look better for Michael but his desire for Rachel remains, sparking a cycle of events that run out of his control.Working almost like a test bed for things he would do better later on, this film allowed the director to try various techniques and styles that didn't really work for him in this case. The plot unfolds in three different time periods are the same time, we are helped out by Michael having a beard in the earliest time periods. The point of these was to create a history for the characters and help keep the interest as we went by not knowing the past until it is significant (a trick he did again in Out of Sight). However here the characters are painted so flat that it's hard to notice any difference in them between the time periods. Also the actual past is quite straightforward and sheds light on nothing of real significance. This stalls the film for the majority and it only really gets going again towards the end, but even that is killed by a series of little twists that culminate in a final shot that simply doesn't make sense and was clearly a cheap way of ending the film on a dramatic note.The direction is OK but perhaps a little heavy on the style. Constant shots through coloured glass makes it all look very clever but it doesn't add anything. At first I thought it was to help distinguish time period (all the armoured car stuff looks green) but then I realised he was just doing it when the mood took him. In Traffic, the emphasis on colour worked well between the three stories but here it just feels like a director trying too hard.Gallagher is an OK actor but can't do much here to shed light on the character. We know that Michael is blessed with poor judgement but beyond that he is a mystery that even Gallagher seems incapable of getting in touch with. Elliot is pretty but also a flat character. The support cast is interesting as it has plenty of well known faces including Fichtner, Dooley, Baker and Shue but really the weakness at the top is the problem here.Overall this is watchable despite it being a little slow and too stylish for it's own good. The overriding impression I got from watching it was that Soderbergh was trying out some ideas to work out what the weaknesses with them were. Add to this a quite straightforward story that is told in three timelines for no discernible benefit to the film and then a cheap series of dramatics when all else fails and you've got a film that doesn't tend to get mentioned in the same breath as his more recent hits.