MALICE (Directed by Harold Becker. Starring Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwith, Peter Gallagher)

A LOT of forethought has gone into Malice, a thriller so convoluted it is half way through before you realise what it is about, and over before you have time to consider how ridiculous it was.

Perennial fall guy Bill Pullman (a kind of ’90’s Tony Randall, standing by in A League Of Their Own, Somersby, and Sleepless In Seattle while a bigger and better looking star moves in on his woman) and nice girl Nicole Kidman are a couple of happily married all-Americans, living in the kind of leafy, sleepy university town that would be visited by aliens in a Steven Spielberg film and by a serial killer in a thriller. No surprises then when Professor Pullman’s students start getting bumped off in standard issue sex attacks (open kitchen door, wide eyed bimbette, enter man whose face is obscured by household furnishings). Is it Pullman? Or perhaps that rather conspicuous extra who played a heavy in The Firm? Or perhaps it’s Pullman’s old acquaintance, the bigger and better looking movie star Alec Baldwin, who makes his entry to the familiar phrase “Speak of the devil!”?

I am of the opinion that scriptwriters who use that line to introduce suspicious characters should be fined and forced to read the entire works of William Shakespeare, but in Malice the banality of the cliché is probably deliberate. Despite having the appearance and aesthetics of a mainstream modern thriller in the Joe Ezsterhas mould, it is almost post modernist in its manipulation of movie convention. Casting and plot construction draw on what audiences have already assimilated, playing up the resemblance to other films, before suddenly rearranging themselves into a new variation.

It is all very clever, but also sort of fiddly and flimsy. Director Harold Becker gave us Sea Of Love, but that had Al Pacino to break through the constraints of the formula and deliver something more substantial. Malice breaks the formula itself, but strands the talented cast in no man’s land, behaving as characters in a movie rather than people in a real dilemma. The result is a film that deceives but doesn’t reward, with a plot so far removed from human experience that it could only have been dreamed up by someone with too much time on their hands.