Though the darkness and severity of the crimes committed determine their potency, cat-and-mouse-style thrillers often come with an erotic subtext. There’s all the mutual fixation; there is also, on the part of the dynamic’s cat, unabating restlessness until their paws are on the other, and on its mouse the pleasure had in teasing — in being pursued.
Out of Sight (1998), directed by Steven Soderbergh and adapted by Scott Frank from a 1996 Elmore Leonard novel, pleasurably brings the subtext into the main text. The mouse is a handsome gentleman’s bank robber named Jack (George Clooney) who, early in the film, escapes from a Florida prison after an impulsive job goes awry. The cat is Karen (Jennifer Lopez), an ambitious federal marshal who happens to be parked in front of the gate under which Jack shimmies on the evening of his attempted liberation.
To keep her quiet, Jack’s getaway driver, Buddy (Ving Rhames), stuffs Karen, along with Jack, in the trunk of his car. Something unexpected happens: the immediate enemies find themselves attracted to each other. More time is spent flirting than sparring, their bond partly built on a shared love of New Hollywood cinema — Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Network (1976).
Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight.
These people’s sexiness and smarts seem to be made equal the more we get to know them. You can feel both Jack and Karen itching to do something more with lives where they’re respectively doomed by the record that comes with a lifelong criminal career and by men who’d rather ogle and/or underestimate them than take their instincts and accomplishments seriously. Besides romantic interest, Jack and Karen seem to give each other something they’re not used to from other people: respect even a powerful upper hand can’t flatten.
Mutual antagonism continues when the two inevitably separate, but the pursuit and its attendant close calls read like an aslant courtship. In Karen’s first dream after their first meeting, she’s still a marshal and Jack is still a record-breakingly prolific criminal largely very good at what he does. Only it culminates not in an arrest but something steamier, both literally and figuratively.
George Clooney and Ving Rhames in Out of Sight.
Out of Sight is, like its source material, a tight and smart good time, full of ticklish dialogue and colorful characters sweating mostly in the Floridian heat. (They’re played by a stacked cast that also includes Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, Catherine Keener, Luis Guzmán, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Michael Keaton, and Nancy Allen.) But it’s never better than in the scenes where it’s just Clooney and Lopez. Their sizzling chemistry lends itself well to characters barely fighting against an erotic temptation they both know is undergirded by the possibility of a downfall — something that works in favor of, rather than against, their desires.
The film’s best scene finds the two clandestinely meeting in a cozy Detroit hotel bar where snow flurries dance in the air outside. They flirtatiously give each other new names — Gary and Celeste — and agree to enjoy a night together free of the dramas inside which they met, the terms sealed by a promise to, by the time the sun rises in the morning, pretend like none of this ever happened. Lopez and Clooney so vibrantly perform the feeling of erotic excitement as they talk — they so ravishingly deliver Frank’s dialogue that their mouths seem to almost curl cat-like around it — that the long-time-coming easing of all the tension in a hotel room feels like the climax of a particularly robust action-movie set piece. That there’s no full-blown sex scene is arguably wise in a movie that so capably uses suggestion, tantalization.
It’s a good thing Clooney was able to expand on the neo-Cary Grant suavity he brings here in his then-burgeoning movie career. You also watch Out of Sight flummoxed that Lopez, only maybe better in 2019’s expertly crowd-pleasing Hustlers, would tend to shy away from the dramatic acting she’s so skilled at for either trifling romantic comedies or largely mediocre music whose returns only keep diminishing. You watch Out of Sight with the impression that you’re watching megawatt stars in a rare vehicle ideally suited to what they’re good at. You wish it were one of many and not an anomaly. Movie stardom, and movies that capture it adequately, requires a certain finicky alchemy.
Peterson Reviews 