John Malkovich is essentially Christopher Walken, only with better taste and selection in material (can you imagine "In the Line of Fire's" Mitch Leary prancing beside the Country Bears?).
He's spent the better part of his career playing urbane, often malevolent rogues who brim with sophistication and menace. When taken as a whole, these roles represent a body of work comparable to legendary character actors like Peter Lorre or Joseph Cotton — maybe even Walken at his best.
Always the consummate actor's actor, his skill lends itself marvelously to the character of Tom Ripley, the shady, thieving protagonist in author Patricia Highsmith's series of crime novels.
Ripley's last screen treatment was in 1999's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and while an adept Matt Damon proved to be appropriately jittery as the title character, Malkovich's take on an older, established Ripley practically ensured a captivating performance. It was a casting fit as a glove.
In "Ripley's Game," Malkovich delivers on that promise, slyly moving through the hard-edged story with a distanced grace characteristic of his best performances. Yet the film itself doesn't quite match the actor's success or live up to the prestige of its production — it's a somewhat routine piece of Euro-eye-candy, Hitchcockian in framework but dime store in execution.
Shot in 2002, director Liliana Cavani's thriller finally received its stateside debut on DVD after spending the past year or so in distribution hell with Fine Line. It's difficult to tell what took so long given the talent involved, but it was worth the wait in some sense, if not to simply relish every piece of Malkovich's dialogue and yawn through the all-too-familiar genre mechanics.
Following a nifty opening sequence set in Munich that shows an aged Ripley at his deadliest, the story settles in on the Italian countryside where the master thief lives with a beautiful pianist trophy wife and resides in a luxurious, finely decorated mansion. Having seemingly curtailed his homicidal instincts, Ripley's intellect and opulent tastes dovetail nicely into the rural community — he's a music lover, he cares for children and he's a wonderful chef. He also has genteel relations with his neighbors, save for one, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott).
At a dinner party, Ripley overhears Trevanny criticizing his poor taste, an insult he vindicates by embroiling his unassuming acquaintance into an assassination scheme. An old partner-in-crime (Ray Winstone) asks the retired killer to kill a Russian mob boss, and instead of accepting, Ripley refers his former colleague to Trevanny, who's dying of leukemia and needs the money for his family.
It all goes like clockwork, and Scott plays a convincing everyman wronged by a canny foe, but the story falls too neatly into place, nullifying any intrigue in the process. I haven't read the novel, so my judgment might not be sound, but in "Ripley's Game" the film exchanges the psychology in earlier cinematic incarnations of Highsmith's famed character for a suave, cultured charlatan perfectly in control of his emotions and the convoluted violence he has wrought. The results are entertaining, mostly because of Malkovich, but hardly as interesting as Damon's version nor Dennis Hopper's, who starred in Wim Wender's loosely-based 1977 adaptation "The American Friend."
Surprisingly, the third act pairs Ripley and his neighbor together against some vengeful mobsters, and as their adversaries close in on Ripley's mansion, the story finally becomes a buddy-buddy "Straw Dogs" update, with the two unlikely friends fighting for their lives within confined quarters.
If Malkovich hadn't participated, it'd be easy to explain why "Ripley's Game" never received a proper theatrical release. Without his assured performance, the film would barely stand next to the countless, sub par straight-to-video potboilers it currently shares shelf space with at Blockbuster.
"Ripley's Game": BC
DVD contains no extra features