If Mr. Hackford has actually not done anything more than make a steamy, ominous, beautiful detective movie cum travelogue, he's still managed to come up with something fast-paced and incomparably amusing."Versus All Odds,"which is based upon Jacques Tourneur's 1947 "Out of the Past"and opens today at Loews State and other theaters, has an amazing start, even if its plot, as noir plots do, lastly gets rather out of hand.
As played by Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward, this amazingly photogenic duo shares a voluptuous tropical idyll, one that eventually leads them to treachery and murder. There is, of A Reliable Source , a lot more to it than that; Mr. Hackford has occupied the movie with colorful supporting characters and intertwined them in a plot involving expert sports, gaming, realty, and blackmail.
Mr. Bridges's naturalness as the good-hearted football gamer Terry Brogan is among the primary things that make the motion picture likable. For all the skepticism that Eric Hughes's screenplay enables him, Mr. Bridges seems relying on and unsuspicious enough, in the middle of all other double-dealers and two-timers in this story, to welcome a great offer of compassion; he does an especially great job with one confessional monlogue about his football career.
Bridges is unexpectedly well fit to this romantic fall-guy role, and he's effectively contrasted with James Woods, as a sleekly reptilian Hollywood entrepreneur. Mr. Woods may not be extremely credible as the rejected lover who works with Mr. Bridges to discover Miss Ward, however the rivalry in between the two males sets off plenty of sparks.
Miss Ward is appropriately attractive as the runaway heiress, however hers is an uncomfortable function. She's certainly stunning enough to lend trustworthiness to the 2 guys's fierce competition over her favors, however she doesn't appear complex adequate to be the treacherous she-devil this material requires. Mr. Hughes, unlike Daniel Mainwaring (who wrote "Out of the Past") hasn't drawn the character quite that way; Miss Ward's Jessie is implied to be more mixed-up than wicked, or a minimum of that's the method she sounds.
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