Shining Through (1992)

Directed by David Seltzer. Starring Melanie Griffith, Michael Douglas, Joely Richardson, Liam Neeson, John Gielgud, Francis Guinan, Ronald Nitschke. [R]

Harebrained wartime spy rigmarole, senselessly told through modern-day framing sequences via a fabricated BBC interview, where the secretary/lover (Griffith) of an OSS officer (Douglas) travels to Berlin so she can intercept V-1 flying bomb plans by getting assigned as servants to mid-level Nazi officers. First, she poses as a cook even though she’s incompetent in the kitchen (despite an embarrassingly bad bit of dialogue about her knowledge of strudel), and then she’s a nanny even though she has no credentials/experience for the job—if all Germans were this dumb, Hitler’s army would have gotten lost on the march through Poland and ended up in Belgrade. Her boss, playing a secondary and frequently offscreen role in these events despite Douglas’ top billing on the poster, is dispatched in the meantime on various intelligence missions and goes to Berlin to help her even though he doesn’t speak a word of German! It’s a running “joke” that much of what Griffith knows about the spy trade comes from the movies, and a lot of spy/war melodramas from the 30s and 40s took many-a contrived leap into the implausible, but nothing like what’s in store for audiences here. Even if there was real suspense and drama (there aren’t) and even if the acting was respectable (it’s not, with Douglas going through the tired motions, Griffith giving awful line readings, and the two of them possessing not a single scrap of shared romantic chemistry), the story is so far-fetched, all you can do is laugh at it and wonder if Susan Isaacs’ source novel is just as inane or if writer/director David Seltzer simply botched the translation in spectacular fashion. The rich, sharp luster of Jan de Bont’s photography goes to waste.

25/100