Quick

When a natty John Gotti type makes rude advances to an attractive brunette while shopping on Rodeo Drive, she responds by blowing him smartly away with a .44 Magnum. Once safe at home, she loses the wig and emerges as Quick (Teri Polo), a bottle blonde with a nasty temper. She's a contract killer working for Muncie (Jeff Fahey), a rotten-apple homicide cop who spends the fruits of her labor on vodka shooters and ill-advised basketball wagers, in between their squalid bouts of intimacy. Meanwhile, mild-mannered mob accountant Herschel Brewer (Martin Donovan) submits to the discipline of his gangster boss Matthew Davenport (Robert Davi), who drives him into the country to meet his girlfriend. She is discovered artfully arranged in the trunk of a car, hacked into multiple pieces--it's payback for their attempts to cook the books. Herschel vows to stick to the straight and narrow, but a chance encounter with a cache of laundered currency inspires him to impulsive measures, and he has to take it on the lam.

Once reason prevails, he stashes the dough and turns himself in to the nearest precinct station, where they whisk him off to a safe house, watched over by Muncie and his rival, the exotic Janet Sakamoto (Tia Carrere). At Quick's suggestion, she and Muncie sell the accountant's whereabouts to bad guy Davenport, but when the hit goes bad and people die, Quick winds up with a handcuffed Herschel in tow. Quick calls Davenport to double her price, and she and Herschel hunker down in a motel, where they fall in something like love. Davenport's thugs close in on them by tracing their phone calls, while Sakamoto closes in on Muncie's dark secrets by retracing his steps. Muncie ends up taking out both Davenport and Sakamoto himself, and agrees to meet with Quick beside the cliff where they first had sex. When Herschel panics and jumps into their conversation, it's clear that somebody has to die. Quick drops Herschel and offers her gun up to Muncie. Herschel, who was only faking, shoots Muncie instead, catching the hunter in his own trap.

As played by Donovan, who made his name in the pathologically mannered indie comedies of Hal Hartley, Herschel's beleaguered everyman can't help but give his lines a witty spin, and he pumps up the action bits with a tinge of sitcom hysteria. And Davi, as the just-business heavy, chews with relish the pulp scenery afforded him. But Polo, in the Sean Young role, isn't quite as light on her feet as she is on her back, and the film winds up neither brutal enough to satisfy hard-boiled conventions nor spry enough to compensate for predictable plot twists. QUICK it may be, but not on the uptake. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment