Sunset

Apart from James Garner, who always seems to shine more in writer-director Blake Edwards’s contraptions than anywhere else, everyone from Bruce Willis, Mariel Hemingway, and Malcolm McDowell (with an indeterminate accent) to Kathleen Quinlan, Jennifer Edwards, and Joe Dallesandro seems to be at sea in this curious movie set in Hollywood in the late 20s. Garner plays Wyatt Earp, hired as a technical adviser on a film in which Tom Mix (Willis) stars; the two of them get involved in uncovering the murderer of a prostitute in a tale that is not quite a comedy, or a murder mystery, or a crime thriller, or an expose of Hollywood slime, but manages to make half-hearted stabs in all these directions. Period flavor and authenticity seem almost nonexistent, and whatever Edwards had in mind, he appears to have kept it mainly to himself; Rod Amateau wrote the original story, so maybe he knows. (JR)

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