According to an Oprah I saw once around when Far and Away came out, this is the movie Tom Cruise saw that made him want to costar with Nicole Kidman in Days of Thunder. I don’t remember a lot of couch-jumping love-declaratory foofaraw with that particular Oprah episode, so I’m pretty sure this was before he was straight. This is satirical and I should not be sued.
Nicole has very curly hair in this film. That is putting it politely; it’s really extremely frizzy in a bad ’80s perm sort of way. She’s a frizzbucket. She’s still fairly cute, but very young (22), and only approaching gorgeous when her hair is wet and thus de-frizzed.
The film is fairly simple but effectively tense: Nicole and Sam Neill are sailing the South Seas on their nice medium yacht when they come across a schooner in distress and a distraught Craig Bierko, who rows over and says everybody is dead on the other boat. Sam rows over to take a look, and then Craig goes crazy and takes over the yacht and Sam is stranded on the other (sinking) boat with a bunch of dead swingers, and Nicole has to run around on the yacht and try to load the shotgun and poison drinks when Craig isn’t looking, all the while trading secretive and meaningful Morse code with Sam over their busted radios.
I was really glad to see Craig Bierko in this, and I thought he was terrific. He’s one of those solid B-list actors that I have always liked and rooted for, and this was a nice part — a fairly high-profile crazy-guy role — for him, and he nailed it, just scary and teetering on the edge between laid-back surfer and I-will-snap-at-any-time murderer-rapist.
Except the final credits rolled, and to my dismay, it wasn’t Craig Bierko at all, it was Billy Zane. Whom I hate. I had to re-evaluate my whole approach to the performance, and it turns out, it wasn’t that great. Smirky and lazy and not that compelling. For shame, Billy Zane.
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