Color of Night

Possible unmet expectations aside, Color of Night remains compelling for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is Bruce Willis, who gives a quietly persuasive performance. Read full review

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever. Read full review

An entertaining mess. [19 Aug 1994, p.03]

Somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won't be bored. Read full review

It’s too much fun to be a failure and too transparently, giddily awful to be an unqualified success, so I’m going to split the difference. Read full review

Meant to be a steamy erotic thriller, it's more annoying than anything else. Surely you will see its Big Surprise coming by the first 15 minutes, and it never begins to achieve the kind of sultry, mesmerizing fascination it so desperately needs. Read full review

Although Rush gives the film visual texture, he can't give it credibility or metaphorical dimension. Color of Night is nocturnal, but not much more. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

Isolated moments in Color of Night hint at Rush's visual creativity. He can spin afresh the most perfunctory scenes -- watch the clever way he shoots a simple fender-bender, or his spectacular take on an opening-scene suicide. But as the story falls into place, the visual embellishments feel increasingly hollow, like fancy icing on a grocery-store sheet cake. [19 Aug 1994, p.G5]

Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have thought this was ''Last Tango in Paris'' all over again. It ain't. [19 Aug 1994, p.C3]

A deliriously brain-dead erotic thriller...The patients (played by, among others, Lesley Ann Warren and Brad Dourif) are all nutjob cliches. Read full review

[A] sleazy, generally embarrassing Hitchcock knock-off. Read full review

The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic. Read full review

A film that isn't so much bad as bizarre with Willis disastrously miscast as a gun-hating trauma victim and the kind of ending that even the writers of Scooby Doo wouldn't dare contemplate. Read full review

Color of Night is yet another in a string of vapid, low-tension headaches passing for suspense thrillers (Fatal Attraction, Jennifer 8, Single White Female) that tries to go everywhere and, instead, goes nowhere. At all. Read full review

Color me dissatisfied with Color of Night. For starters, it's a murder mystery with a really obvious solution. How obvious? It's so embarrassingly obvious that even I figured it out - and I can never figure these things out. Read full review

An increasingly ridiculous hybrid of sexy romance, murder mystery and psychological mumbo jumbo, it's another bad spin on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," with plummetings from high-up places, repressed guilt and love for a mysterious woman. But its watchability is more attributable to comic relief from Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren and others than the ballyhooed steam between Willis and March. Read full review

It is sad, truly sad, to have to report that Color of Night is a disappointment in almost every respect. Read full review

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain. Read full review

Where's John McClane when you need him? If nothing else, the main character from the two Die Hard films would have livened up proceedings in this pathetically inept psychological thriller. Read full review

Were expectations running too high for this "erotic thriller" from legendary director Richard Rush, who hasn't completed a movie in 14 years? Or is it really the full-blown fiasco it appears to be? Read full review

You thought brawny Bruce Willis couldn't play a brainy psychologist? You were right. Or maybe it's the idiocy of the movie surrounding him that sinks his performance long before the halfway mark. Read full review

But there is nothing erotic in the coupling between Willis and March, who repeatedly took off her clothes in 1992's "The Lover" to much greater effect. The movie is tepid as a thriller, too, since it's not hard to guess the killer's identity and motive. What's worse is that you don't really care about either, though it is fun to see Willis menaced several times by a red - get it? [18 Aug 1994]

A convoluted psychosexual thriller that promises the moon and gives us Bruce's butt. Read full review

Of all of its lies, the worst may be that Color of Night perpetuates the notion that people who seek therapy are more dangerous to others than those who don't. The film also makes a direct link between sexual appetite and violence. Read full review

This summer's first really bad major movie has finally arrived, and it's time to celebrate. There's been a lot of mediocrity, but until Color of Night there'd been nothing deeply rotten on the grand scale of "Last Action Hero" or "Hudson Hawk." [19 Aug 1994, p.9F]

A plot-twist whodunit that even Forrest Gump might crack, it's also a Hall of Fame howler from long-inactive Richard Rush, whose direction of 1967's Hell's Angels on Wheels now seems comparably placid. [19 Aug 1994, p.10D]

Color of Night is a knuckleheaded thriller that means to get a rise out of audiences, but will merely make them see red. It's confounding and sad that director Richard Rush waited 14 years to make another film after his striking "The Stunt Man," only to choose a script as dismal as this. Read full review

It's sad to see mercurial talent unused, and even more disheartening to see it completely wasted. Color of Night, the first film in 14 years from director Richard Rush, is a dreadful miscalculation of a comeback; a sexual thriller equally lewd and ludicrous. Rush has already disavowed the reworked version opening nationwide today, promising his original vision will be available later on video. [19 Aug 1994, p.7B]