"Midnight Crossing" (citywide) is such an overheated, swank movie that at times it resembles a coffee-table version of a Sidney Sheldon story: murderous soap opera splashed with Schweppes, lime and plot twists.
In many ways, it's a bad movie--but an interestingly bad one. Writer-director Roger Holzberg has obvious talent, and he hasn't failed in the usual empty, cynical ways. He's failed more daringly. Instead of copying the latest gore-drenched slasher thriller, his material suggests something that Nicolas Roeg, Rene Clement or Roman Polanski might try. It's about the buried secrets and pathologies that lie under a carefully composed bourgeois surface.
Holzberg's unbuttoned melodrama shows two initially attractive couples on a pleasure cruise-turned-treasure hunt. One couple, the Shubbs, are young, sexually excitable and quarrelsome (John Laughlin and Kim Cattrall). The other, the Bartons, are older, a naval officer-turned-insurance salesman (Daniel Travanti) and his glaucoma-stricken wife (Faye Dunaway). As they get closer to the treasure, the sun drops, dark winds and squalls descend, and greed and lust overwhelm them. The cruise becomes a nightmare of suspicion, murder and betrayal.
In the film, Travanti's Barton, who initially seems milky-nice and overly solicitous, turns into a monster of treachery and evil. The younger couple's problems deepen, and, in a typical irony, Dunaway's blind wife sees the truth more than any of them.
