Color of Night

Rare is the movie that benefits from addition. Color of Night is almost but not quite the exception that proves the rule. According to TV Tropes, “The director’s cut [which runs 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release] restored … much of the film’s humor.” Not nearly enough of it, though; if the movie had truly embraced its comedic potential, it could have been the Naked Gun of erotic thrillers. Less than three minutes after he has been accused of being figuratively colorblind, psychologist Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) goes literally colorblind. To call this foreshadowing is an insult to prefixes. Bill loses the ability to see the color red when one of his patients defenestrates herself (the dummy that takes the fall is so stiff it looks like it might start gliding away at any second). When the woman crash-lands on the street, we are treated to a shot of her bleeding face — from below; it’s sort of like the Sunset Boulevard pool shot only instead of looking through water, we are somehow looking through pavement. A distraught Bill goes to visit his colleague and best friend Bob Moore (Scott Bakula) in Los Angeles. Bob invites Bill to sit in on a group therapy session, where one of the patients notices with amusement that Bill is wearing one red sock and one green sock — which of course looks only slightly more ridiculous than if either color actually matched. Bob is soon stabbed to death in a scene that wouldn’t be entirely out of place in the first Scary Movie, and that culminates with Bob crashing through a glass door — well, he actually doesn’t so much crash through it as leans gently on it, at which point the door collapses like it was made of sugar glass as opposed to glass-glass, except for one particular shard that’s bigger and sturdier than the rest; so much so, in fact, that poor Bob can’t help impaling himself on it. All five members of Bob’s therapy group are suspects, though sadly only two are blatant red herrings. Now, if the film had taken itself much less seriously, a joke about Bill’s inability to detect a red herring would have written itself; it would also have been funny if the entire group were composed of Usual Suspects (why not, for example, Ted Levine and Tom Noonan to complement Brad Dourif and Lance Henriksen?). Bill takes over Bob’s duties and in the process becomes the subject of a couple of unintentionally hilarious assassination attempts, including a rare Car Fu/Fallacy of the Predictable Tree hybrid — and who could forget the ol’ Rattlesnake in the Mailbox? As for the intercourse scenes, the norm is that you couldn’t make sex funny if you tried; then again, director Richard Rush wasn’t trying, and that’s how come we get, among other things, a toy tank used as a sex toy (doubly weird because this occurs in a bathtub, so shouldn’t it be a toy boat?), and a scene in which, even though he’s off-screen, you can hear (and then can never, ever un-hear) the exact moment when Bill grunts his way to climax. Oh, and there’s also a sardonically wisecracking homicide detective played by Rubén Blades who, in a moment of self-awareness bordering on self-parody, mercilessly mocks the other characters for being so dumb (“How in the name of God could all of you be going out with the same woman and not know? Not have a clue? … I’m gonna call the Guinness Book of World Records because I think this woman deserves credit. And I’m gonna make sure that all of your names are included so you can all share in the glory”). That’s precisely what this movie needed; more Hudson Hawk and less Striking Distance.