WHEN HEARTHROBS GO BAD: BAD INFLUENCE, INTERNAL AFFAIRS
Last week, I talked about stars playing to their image, and effectively. In this article, I'm going to explore two movies where the lead actors played against their images. In both cases, it's actors best known for being hearthrobs (you know, the kind which get voted as PEOPLE magazine's sexiest man of the year or whatever) who decided to take a shot at playing a bad guy. And in each case, the result is better than you might think.
Until 1989, Rob Lowe was best known for being a member of the Brat Pack. Nowadays, he's best known as the passionate, if somewhat geeky, Deputy Communications Director on TV's THE WEST WING. But in 1989, Lowe made an embarrassing appearance at the Academy Awards, and then was the subject of tabloid scandal when videotape surfaced of him having sex with a minor in a motel room. All of which goes to show that Lowe's career at this time was pretty near bottom. So when he decided to try and stretch himself playing the bad guy in Curtis Hanson's thriller BAD INFLUENCE, not a lot of people noticed. Indeed, those who did saw this as more titilation; after all, Lowe plays a character who videotapes people having sex, and one could joke that the movie features the star of SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE - James Spader - and the star of "Sex, truth, and videotape" - Lowe. But that does a disservice to this decent thriller.
As with Hanson's previous film, THE BEDROOM WINDOW, this is one of those rare modern-day movies which deserves comparison to Hitchcock. It doesn't have his inspiration, but it has his craft. Spader plays Michael, a yuppie who feels trapped by his life. He's getting married to Ruth (Marcia Cross), even though he's not ready for it at all, his constantly having to support his hippie-ish brother Bismo (Christian Clemenson), and on top of that, he's just found out that morning that Patterson (Tony Maggio) has stolen part of his work and passed it off as his own, which means Patterson gets the promotion and not him. So Michael, feeling depressed, goes to a bar to have a drink. At the bar, a biker gets mad when he thinks Michael is coming on to his girlfriend, and is about to start something when a beer bottle is smashed against the counter. Michael looks behind him, and the one who smashed the bottle is Alex (Lowe), who challenges the biker to a fight. The biker walks away, and before Michael can collect his wits, so does Alex.
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