The Last Seduction

A more recent movie that I recorded during one of the free preview weekends was The Last Seduction. (Hey, 25 years old is pretty recent for this blog!)

Bill Pullman plays Clay Gregory, a doctor in New York city who runs what authorities would nowadays derisively call a "pill mill", prescribing addictive medicines at the drop of a hat. As such, he's got access to large quantities of those medicines, quantities which would be worth a hell of a lot on the black market. So his wife Bridget (Linda Fiorentino), a manager in a telemarketing boiler room, has convinced him to do one sale on the black market to make the two of them a large sum of money.

Well, only one of the two of them. While Clay is taking a shower afterwards, Bridget decides she's going to take the money and run, which unsurprisingly pisses off Clay. Bridget gets in her car and drives west toward Chicago, but stops to spend the night in the "cow town" of Beston, somewhere in western New York, where the siren song is actually the call of Buffalo, already a declining Rust Belt city at the time.

In a bar in Beston, Bridget meets Mike Swale (Peter Berg). He works at the local insurance company branch, which seems surprisingly large for a town like Beston, but ignore that plot hole. Bridget has a one-night stand with Mike, but upon learning of the existence of the insurance company, decides she can get a job there as her management skills will be needed. Using the phony name of Wendy Kroy, claiming her husband abused her, she gets a job where she's the boss of Mike -- who for his part has returned to Beston from Buffalo after a disastrously brief marriage.

Clay is looking for Bridget, and has hired private detective Harlan (Bill Nunn) to find Bridget and the money, not being able to go through normal channels since the money was obtained rather illegally. Harlan at first tracks her to the area code (something you wouldn't be able to do today of course thanks to the portability of phone numbers) and then does find her. But Bridget is one step ahead of everybody else, it seems, and is able to thwart Harlan, and a more local investigator that Clay hires.

Bridget is also hard at work on manipulating Mike. When she's decided that Clay has gotten too close to her, she comes up with an audacious plan to have Mike go down to New York City and kill Clay, although Mike doesn't realize that the man he's supposed to kill is in fact Bridget's husband.

The Last Seduction is a thoroughly enjoyable, if disturbing at times movie, with a look at a femme fatale who is one really nasty woman. Fiorentina is excellent, and the story is mostly good although I did feel there were a few plot holes. I was amused in looking it up on IMDb that the "cow town" of Beston was actually played by Irvington, which is a very affluent suburb of New York City in Westchester County. Perhaps the establishing shot for the bar entrance was done somewhere else, or it was still around back in 1994. If I had one problem with the movie, it was with the score, which I found extremely intrusive.

That score, however, in no way takes away from my very high recommendation for The Last Seduction.