Color of Night (1994)

Directed by Richard Rush. Starring Bruce Willis, Jane March, Rubén Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Scott Bakula, Andrew Lowery, Eriq La Salle. [R]

Psychologist Willis develops psychosomatic color blindness after one of his patients commits suicide by jumping through his office window. He travels to the West Coast to stay with a colleague/friend, and even sits in on of the therapist’s group sessions with a quintet of weirdos, but after the friend gets hacked and slashed to death, he starts to suspect one of the patients is the killer. There’s also a sexy woman (March) in the mix—isn’t there always?—who enters his life as a young, sensuous enigma, and soon she’s added to the list of suspects when he learns she has a personal history with one (or more?) of the patients. That’s an awful lot of contrived plot elements for a single sex-and-murder story to handle, and the narrative is so disjointed as it crashes from one scene to the next, it’s very difficult to keep track of all the kinks and quirks and secret relationships and fuzzy motives. As such, it can be enjoyed on the level of lurid trash—there’s an amusingly off-the-wall performance from Rubén Blades as a detective operating on ever-shifting levels of competence and insight, plus plentiful nudity from March—but it can’t be taken seriously or logically for one second. The sheer number of implausible (if not outright preposterous scenes), like Willis being stalked by a car at the top of a parking garage or a climactic suicidal climb following a nail-gun fight, along with the ultimately useless “color blind” gimmick which has no significant effect on the plot, defeat the convolutions of its crazed mystery. And can anyone explain why Willis can be spotted wearing a beige jacket, white undershirt, and light blue jeans in one scene, an ensemble that looks almost exactly like his get-up for Pulp Fiction released the same year? Richard Rush’s director’s cut restores almost twenty minutes of initially-cut material (this review refers to that longer version).

39/100