Let's see ... there's a serial killer on the loose, the police commissioner's brother is a genius profiler but is working instead as a fireman because of some not-clearly-explained scandal from two years ago involving bribery, and the brothers don't get along because the profiler had an affair with the commissioner's wife and their mother liked the profiler better.
The mayor is catching heat from the press over the murders so he demands that the profiler brother be reinstated on the force to catch the killer ... but not until after the ELEVENTH victim is killed! Red tape and pensions be damned, poof! the firefighter is now a policeman again, and for some reason insists that his artist friend who, in an unlikely blending of talents, is also a computer geek becomes a policeman too and he brings his parrot to the precinct, but does the profiler jump right on the case? Does he tell his brother that he's been following the case all these months and has some interesting theories about it? Noooo, he spends precious time trying to get his brother's wife, for whom he has been carrying a torch all this time, back into bed by cooking her a dinner consisting of weird foods because if she eats the food that means she still loves him. But she doesn't like the dinner so the profiler takes the mayor's daughter to bed instead, after he meets her at an ice skating rink about 20 minutes after her best friend's (who was the latest victim of the serial killer) funeral. Why she is at an ice skating rink is a mystery, but I suppose different people handle grief in different ways.
Are all the other cops working overtime trying to find the killer? Nooo, the only other cops we see in the precinct are two young kids and they're in no hurry to do much of anything, and when the killer is finally found and they're asked to send backup to the scene they don't move much faster. And when we finally get a brief glimpse of the killer he's in blackface and wearing a fright wig, looking like a minstrel Harpo Marx; now there's a surefire way not to bring attention to yourself when you're skulking through an apartment building. Or maybe the killer was just trying to look like the mayor, who also had a funky hairdo.
The profiler takes about a day to figure out the serial killer's M.O., so if he had been called in after, say, the SECOND murder instead of a year later, a lot more lives might have been saved. The police commissioner might have been the dirty cop after all, I'm not quite sure, and in the end the profiler, who has been lusting after his brother's wife for all this time, suddenly decides he doesn't care about her at all.
This is all happening in Hazzard County, and the characters are named Bo and Luke, right? Nope, it's New York City and this is supposedly serious business.
If, as some other reviewers have mentioned, this movie was more about the quirkiness of the profiler character, or about his relationships with the two women, my thought is that the writers would have been better off to have used a non-violent jewel thief as the focus of the police investigation because strangling women is just too serious a topic to take this lightly.
Kevin Kline, as the profiler, alternates between being serious about his job and playing it for laughs: he rescues a child from a burning building, gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then asks nobody in particular if they can bring him a coffee, preferably an espresso. Harvey Keitel, as the police commissioner, spends the entire film looking embarrassed, and Rod Steiger, the mayor, tries too hard to work cusswords into his every conversation.
Susan Sarandon, the adulterous wife/spurned lover, goes from being a woman who still has soft feelings for Kline to being a bitchy gossip-monger who delights in telling the mayor that his daughter is sleeping with Kline. Alan Rickman's throwaway artist/computer geek character is apparently included only to supply an excuse for having a nude model, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is the 23-year-old mayor's daughter who still lives with her father and seems not to have a job because she's always at Kline's apartment.
As for the title, January Man, it doesn't make sense. The killer has had a victim in every month, so why not call him the June Man or the November Man? He uses a blue ribbon to strangle all his victims, so why hasn't he already been nicknamed the Blue Ribbon Killer? And why bother to name the film after the killer anyway, since that whole part of the storyline is more of an afterthought than a driving force? This might have been a fun film when it came out in 1989 but in light of all that has happened since then and how much we now know about serial killers it is embarrassing to watch today. If you're a Kevin Kline fan you might enjoy it for his performance, as silly as it is, but Harvey Keitel fans should rent "Smoke" instead.
The mayor is catching heat from the press over the murders so he demands that the profiler brother be reinstated on the force to catch the killer ... but not until after the ELEVENTH victim is killed! Red tape and pensions be damned, poof! the firefighter is now a policeman again, and for some reason insists that his artist friend who, in an unlikely blending of talents, is also a computer geek becomes a policeman too and he brings his parrot to the precinct, but does the profiler jump right on the case? Does he tell his brother that he's been following the case all these months and has some interesting theories about it? Noooo, he spends precious time trying to get his brother's wife, for whom he has been carrying a torch all this time, back into bed by cooking her a dinner consisting of weird foods because if she eats the food that means she still loves him. But she doesn't like the dinner so the profiler takes the mayor's daughter to bed instead, after he meets her at an ice skating rink about 20 minutes after her best friend's (who was the latest victim of the serial killer) funeral. Why she is at an ice skating rink is a mystery, but I suppose different people handle grief in different ways.
Are all the other cops working overtime trying to find the killer? Nooo, the only other cops we see in the precinct are two young kids and they're in no hurry to do much of anything, and when the killer is finally found and they're asked to send backup to the scene they don't move much faster. And when we finally get a brief glimpse of the killer he's in blackface and wearing a fright wig, looking like a minstrel Harpo Marx; now there's a surefire way not to bring attention to yourself when you're skulking through an apartment building. Or maybe the killer was just trying to look like the mayor, who also had a funky hairdo.
The profiler takes about a day to figure out the serial killer's M.O., so if he had been called in after, say, the SECOND murder instead of a year later, a lot more lives might have been saved. The police commissioner might have been the dirty cop after all, I'm not quite sure, and in the end the profiler, who has been lusting after his brother's wife for all this time, suddenly decides he doesn't care about her at all.
This is all happening in Hazzard County, and the characters are named Bo and Luke, right? Nope, it's New York City and this is supposedly serious business.
If, as some other reviewers have mentioned, this movie was more about the quirkiness of the profiler character, or about his relationships with the two women, my thought is that the writers would have been better off to have used a non-violent jewel thief as the focus of the police investigation because strangling women is just too serious a topic to take this lightly.
Kevin Kline, as the profiler, alternates between being serious about his job and playing it for laughs: he rescues a child from a burning building, gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then asks nobody in particular if they can bring him a coffee, preferably an espresso. Harvey Keitel, as the police commissioner, spends the entire film looking embarrassed, and Rod Steiger, the mayor, tries too hard to work cusswords into his every conversation.
Susan Sarandon, the adulterous wife/spurned lover, goes from being a woman who still has soft feelings for Kline to being a bitchy gossip-monger who delights in telling the mayor that his daughter is sleeping with Kline. Alan Rickman's throwaway artist/computer geek character is apparently included only to supply an excuse for having a nude model, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is the 23-year-old mayor's daughter who still lives with her father and seems not to have a job because she's always at Kline's apartment.
As for the title, January Man, it doesn't make sense. The killer has had a victim in every month, so why not call him the June Man or the November Man? He uses a blue ribbon to strangle all his victims, so why hasn't he already been nicknamed the Blue Ribbon Killer? And why bother to name the film after the killer anyway, since that whole part of the storyline is more of an afterthought than a driving force? This might have been a fun film when it came out in 1989 but in light of all that has happened since then and how much we now know about serial killers it is embarrassing to watch today. If you're a Kevin Kline fan you might enjoy it for his performance, as silly as it is, but Harvey Keitel fans should rent "Smoke" instead.