Mickey Rourke bores in tawdry sequel to '9 1/2 Weeks'

By Dini S. Djalal

JAKARTA (JP): Webster's defines has-been as a "person that was formerly popular or effective but no longer so".

They should add two more words to their description. Mickey Rourke.

Remember Mickey Rourke? Whether whispering sweet nothings in Diner, staring enigmatically in Rumble Fish, or shuffling gracefully through New York's streets in The Pope of Greenwich Village, in the early 1980s he symbolized the modern man's reticence towards that era's vulgarities. He spoke softly as the money-grabbing din around him thickened or grinned demurely as others cackled crude jokes.

And though he was often accused of effeminacy, Rourke simmered with a sensuality defiant of macho trappings. Mickey Rourke was, as the cliche goes, cool, calm and collected, and easily one of Hollywood's best actors.

Then, in 1985, the glacier melted. In Adrian Lyne's sexual psycho-drama 9 1/2 Weeks, Rourke metamorphosed from popsicle to pop tart, trading in his incorporeal dignity for a chunk of Kim Basinger's thighs. Vanquished into the abyss of Wall Street was his self-effacing modesty; as stockbroker John Gray he now jetted from SoHo gallery to Armani emporium, proudly peering from a Porsche. He had Basinger as gallery owner Elizabeth McGraw licking off her lip gloss, among other things, at the opulence.

Yet as shallow as the film was -- all MTV-inspired striptease segments and droll delvings into unorthodox utilizations of fruit -- it remains a fine moment of cinematic style. Sure, it missed the point of Elizabeth McNeill's autobiographical sadomasochistic novel, from which Lyne culled this paltry piece of fluff, but it was an endearing effort.

Unfortunately, from then on, Rourke's career took a dive into the shoddy world of smut. 9 1/2 Weeks was followed by Angel Heart (1987), in which Rourke wrestles naked with Cosby Show daughter Lisa Bonet, and Wild Orchid (1989), a grind-a-thon masquerading as cinema, and featuring Rourke's soon-to-be wife Carre Otis as the apple (or cherry?) of his now tiresome bedroom eyes. In both films, Rourke was accused of not faking his sex scenes, hinting at a man slowly but surely losing the plot.

It was around this time that Rourke began a side career as a boxer, and accrued a reputation for violence culminating in Otis' lawsuit accusing him of abuse. And it wasn't only his wife who took a beating.

Rourke's film career became incidental to the bigger job of being a blockhead, as proven in the coherence-challenged Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. To the horror of film buffs who loved his early work, Rourke, living large (literally, as shown by his beer-happy girth) in Miami, had pawned his charisma for a lifetime stock of leather vests and bandannas.

Smut Sequel

But Rourke hasn't completely retired from acting, at least not technically. Jakarta audiences now have the privilege of watching Rourke wine and dine yet another half-naked starlet in Another 9 1/2 Weeks, a sequel in the mold of Emmanuelle 2 or, if it was ever made, Deep Throat: The Morning After.

To say that Another 9 1/2 Weeks is bad is too easy -- this film is beyond even Sunset Boulevard's standards of bad taste.

And bad production. A read through the film's synopsis, released by producers Peter Hoffman and Sidney Kimmel, reveals a plot dramatically different from what was onscreen.

For example, the film opens with John (Rourke) toying simultaneously with a diamond watch and a handgun. John, hair dyed black and eyes sunken with sorrow, is laboring suicidal thoughts in a room more Eighties than the Eighties, all chrome walls, shadowy light, and artistically laid out white sheets. He's brooding over the departed Elizabeth, whom he follows to Paris.

In the synopsis, however, Gray broods over a blindfolded blond on his hotel bed -- her towering nakedness amazingly eclipsing the censors. John's trying hard to forget Elizabeth, because obviously the perversion of their romance was potent stuff. But, judging by the gaping mouths in the theater, what the audience really can't forget are the blond's, ahem, assets.

Maybe the nudity is meant to soften the script discrepancies, as well as lure audiences. And the inconsistencies are trivial compared to the film's other monumental disasters. One of these is Angie Everheart playing fashion designer Lea Callot, a friend of Elizabeth's in Paris, who tries to fulfill her lust for John by withholding information about the object of his affections.

Lea ends up playing fashion designer with John, measuring the circumference of his trousers with her tongue. And Everheart does so with so much frothing relish that you would think the leggy former model and ex-girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone has no career option other than perfecting the role of the bimbo.

Well, after this clunker, she probably doesn't. When, in a rare verbose moment, John says to Elizabeth "What's this crap?", he could be talking about the movie. But the crap comes in glossy packaging. Shot in Versailles-like rooms and employing more busty models than a Donald Trump yacht party, Another 9 1/2 Weeks is a two-hour segment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's almost as if the Eighties never left.

Which, for Mickey Rourke and director Anne Goursaud, it evidently hasn't. Since the film has no redeemable wit, tolerable acting, or plausible message, and is but a thin disguise for a strip show, a critic is left summing up the film's superficialities; its pacing (slow), settings (pretentious), moods (morose) and cultural references (tired).

All of which, from Elizabeth's Claude Montana rip-off collection to the silver Porsche which whizzes by picturesque Parisian streets but somehow never passes the less glamorous housing estates in the suburbs, screams the ignorant materialism of the 1980s.

Which begs the question: Why? Whatever happened to the sublime Mickey Rourke? Why is he now making such dreadful films?

Rourke's lips may hold the answer. The fact that Rourke barely talks in this movie is disturbing until you realize talking for him it may be painful. After all, all that collagen in his lips, not to mention the stretched-and-tucked skin between his ears, may impede gregarious facial movements.

And vanity costs. Maybe even as much as the fee for a bad B- movie.