Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)

As far as erotic thrillers go, this one had a lot to live up to after viewings of Sea Of Love (1989) and In The Cut (2003) the previous week. I wasn’t aware until the opening credits rolled that this was a Ridley Scott venture, a bit of a surprise considering his general output. Mike, a married police officer, is tasked with protecting Claire, a wealthy witness in a murder case, a murder that we see carried out in an early sequence. It’s no whodunit; we know it's Joey (Andreas Katsulas, he of one armed fame in The Fugitive [1993]) so the intrigue of the ‘who’ is lost early on. Which means the film has to draw us in using characters and other means, and largely, it succeeds. Mike inevitably is drawn into an affair with Claire (it’s in the synopsis) but I just don’t know why, Mike’s wife Ellie and their son offer nothing to suggest he doesn’t have a happy home life. Of course, this sort of thing appears to happen all the time and it’s some sort of bizarre societal acceptance that this sort of thing ‘just happens’ but for someone who finds that hard to understand, I didn’t buy the lack of reasoning behind it. Claire and Mike’s relationship seems genuine, but it’s the how they got there part that raised too many questions for me to fully accept it. Other than that Scott’s foray into this genre works reasonably well, there are some tense scenes (if a tad too drawn out in some places) and the final confrontation is fine. The post confrontation was a slight problem for me, but to explain why gives away the ending. Worth your time, but you’d be better off with a few cans and Fatal Attraction (1992) or even better, Sea Of Love (1989). 6.5/10