A Kiss Before Dying

This is Matt Dillon's first film since Drugstore Cowboy, and demonstrates again that he is one of the best actors working in movies. He possesses the secret of not giving too much, of not trying so hard that we're distracted by his performance. Read full review

Despite the holes in the script, Fatal Attraction writer James Dearden moves the action along competently and has two compelling young actors in Dillon and Young. [26 Apr 1991, p.C]

A Kiss Before Dying is low-level trash that works. It's far from ambitious, and even considered within the cheap-thriller category, this movie is nothing to make a fuss about. And yet the production is perfectly watchable. [03 May 1991, p.6]

A Kiss Before Dying is not Crime and Punishment. It is pop movie making to be enjoyed without guilt. Read full review

What's missing here though is the novel's trick of being a wonderfully contrived mystery on the surface while underneath lurks an angry and upsetting analysis of class injustice in the USA. Read full review

Writer/director Dearden's version of Ira Levin's novel is routine stuff, neither thrilling nor revealing as a portrait of a psychopath. Read full review

Plodding, literal and completely lacking in the erotic tension that seems to be essential to the genre. Not much passes between Matt Dillon and Sean Young that could be defined as frisson - there is no ambiguity, no risk, no charge. [26 Apr 1991, p.C2]

A Kiss Before Dying is a thriller without thrills, though it has some of the built-in kicks of a crime movie -- wondering what's going on, wondering why it's happening, wondering how it's going to end. Unfortunately, it ultimately gets so silly that the main thing people in the audience may end up wondering is why they're still sitting there. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

Dillon is a potent combination of looks, charm and menace, as he proved in Drugstore Cowboy, but Dearden’s script fails to provide the raw material that would let him go beyond the stereotype. Read full review

A Kiss Before Dying is one of those films that may play absurdly in a theatre, eliciting hoots, groans and sighs of relief at its end from the audience, but on video provides a mindless, undemanding diversion. Read full review

Deceptions drive A Kiss Before Dying. Too bad they're too implausible to impart any sense of believability in this bloody fantasy. [26 Apr 1991, p.10]

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

Even the neatness here is borrowed. A Kiss Before Dying isn't a remake; it's a rehash. [27 Apr 1991]

There's no buildup (hence, no suspense) and no combustion between the leads. Dillon and Young are both better than their reps, and Dearden orchestrated the sizzle between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Something must have gone terribly awry here. [26 Apr 1991, p.4D]

Writer-director Dearden, who earned his gruesome credentials as the screenwriter on Fatal Attraction, underlines his leading lady's lack of rudimentary skill by leaving the soundtrack full of dead air and amateurish articulation during numerous conversations. He's also repeatedly drawn to Hitchcock allusions that slip out of his grasp. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

Director-screenwriter Dearden, who wrote the script for Fatal Attraction, does a terrible job of making the pieces of the who's-he-going-to-kill-next narrative stick; jumping around with an unnerving frequency, this film self-destructs before your very eyes. Read full review

For those of us who don’t fancy ourselves connoisseurs of badness, A Kiss Before Dying is less than delectable. It’s a real botch-a-thon, and it gets worse as it goes along. Read full review

Played with a satirical edge, this update on the pulpy 1956 thriller about a murderous social climber might have been good for a chill and a hoot, but played straight it's a real clunker. Read full review

A Kiss Before Dying is so wooden, it wouldn't hurt to spray for Dutch elm disease. Adapted from Ira Levin's intricate suspense thriller, it becomes another perfunctory sex-and-death parable in the hands of Fatal Attraction's screenwriter James Dearden, who has dismantled the original plot and turned it on end. Needless to say, it is far less suspenseful when you find out who did it in the first scene. [26 Apr 1991, p.B6]

A Kiss Before Dying longs to be a thriller in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, but tailspins into the mire of Bret Easton Ellis. This is a witless, poorly constructed movie, stumbling over plot holes as big as Hitchcock's belly. [22 Apr 1991]

A thriller that fails on every level, it doesn't even make you want to find out what happens next. [26 Apr 1991, p.20]

All the good points together can't make up for the film's mostly soggy acting, particularly by Sean Young and Matt Dillon in the leading roles, or for the technically inept way the voices have been dubbed over the picture - the characters sound like they're reading their lines from a phone booth. Even second-rate Hollywood movies generally have a certain amount of craft and professionalism, but there's precious little here. I say, kiss this one goodbye. [17 May 1991, p.13]

A Kiss Before Dying is nothing if not devious. But it's also a textbook example of incompetent direction. [29 Apr 1991, p.C5]

Coincidental plot puts kiss of death on apathetic film. [29 Apr 1991, p.D05]

The suspense trickles out of A Kiss Before Dying in the first 10 or 15 minutes, and the movie just lies there until the final 10 or 15 minutes. Writer-director James Dearden tries to inject life into the long, slow middle with blood, breasts and buttocks, but we never sense that any of these attributes belongs to actual breathing human beings. [26 Apr 1991, p.5F]

With its waxy color scheme and nonexistent pace, the movie is like an homage to Hitchcock’s worst period. Read full review