Someone to Watch Over Me

The situation might have seemed merely a script writer's contrivance except that Howard Franklin ("The Name of the Rose") has fashioned a plot that is both convincing and affecting. Director Ridley Scott happily keeps the human situation in the foreground while exercising his remarkable visual talent. [5 Nov 1987]

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit. Read full review

Much of the credit for what works in the film should go to the excellent cast. Berenger is superb, and Rogers proves here that she can handle a lead role with class and aplomb. Bracco, however, steals the picture with a refreshing energy and wit. Read full review

This means that Someone to Watch Over Me is a much more interesting movie (than "Fatal Attraction").[9 Oct 1987]

The movie is exciting, richly textured. But, despite its high quality, there’s something unformed about it, like a poem that doesn’t quite sing, a painting with a color missing...Even if Someone to Watch Over Me is flawed, it’s the kind of film that offers you many subsidiary pleasures. Read full review

Someone to Watch Over Me is a stylish and romantic police thriller which manages, through the sleek direction of Ridley Scott and persuasive ensemble performances, to triumph over several hard-to-swallow plot developments. Read full review

What with these pictorial pollutants, he loses sight of plot. "Someone" suffers somewhat from Scott's blind spot, but it's still a reasonably enjoyable romantic thriller with "Platoon's" Tom Berenger on his best behavior. Read full review

Scott retains his sense of mood and tension. Despite the script's predictable and flawed nature, he elevates Someone To Watch Over Me to the point that it emerges as a surprisingly satisfying piece of filmed entertainment. [9 Oct 1987, p.3D]

What Scott brings to this, for him, surprisingly conventional genre moving is a superb sense of mood, seductive settings and a nice feel for the comedy of colliding social classes. Yet for all its tension and style, the movie feels thin. The obligatory violent ending is a real letdown: implausibly plotted and much too familiar. And while there's nothing wrong with Berenger's solid, witty performance, he's a little bland. [12 Oct 1987, p.84D]

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story. Read full review

While the actors show some sensitivity and Scott works up a modicum of suspense and involvement, the real interest of this picture is the radiance of the images—a mastery of lighting and decor second only to Scott's Blade Runner, with atmospheric textures so dense you can almost taste them. Unfortunately, this mastery bears only the most glancing relationship to the story at hand, and Scott becomes guilty of the sort of formalism that used to be charged (less justly) against Josef von Sternberg. But even though the movie doesn't leave much of a residue, it looks terrific while you're watching it: Manhattan has seldom appeared as glitzy or as glamorous. Read full review

Berenger and Rogers look right and move right, but there is no spark behind the emotions they dutifully mime. Shading is something the director reserves for inanimate objects: He makes things come alive and turns people flat. Read full review

A handsome but empty romantic thriller with the most passionless love triangle you may ever see. [9 Oct 1987, p.D1]

[Ridley Scott] draws you into a dull, sensual daydreaminess, but after watching Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers for a while, you look around for the stars. With so much buildup - so much terror-tinged atmosphere - you expect actors with some verve, and you wonder why the script doesn't sneak in a few jokes. (Has a good thriller ever been this solemn? Or this simple?)

Howard Franklin's screenplay plays less like a feature film than like the pilot for a failed television series about New York policemen. Read full review