The January Man [DVD]

With New York prey to a serial killer who selects a different victim for each month of the year, Mayor Flynn (Rod Steiger) orders Commissioner Frank Starkey to call in the one man who can catch him: Frank's estranged brother and ex-cop Nick (Kevin Kline). Nick's unorthodox approach soon gets people's backs up - especially when he trails his ex-girlfriend (now Frank's wife) Christine (Susan Sarandon) and Flynn's daughter Bernadette (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio)! From .co.uk ----------- The January Man is an odd comedy-thriller about the hunt for a serial killer that could just be a case of too many stars spoil the movie. The screenplay is by John Patrick Shanley, who won an O for Moonstruck. The plot goes like this: a serial killer is terrorising Manhattan, targeting one woman a month, much to the horror of the mayor (a rabid Rod Steiger, more foam than substance) and the commissioner Frank Starkey (Harvey Keitel). There's only one man to save their bacon: enter Nick Starkey (Kevin Kline), brother of Frank, who had been a cop but was kicked out of the force for his unorthodox ways. Being a heroic kind of guy, his next career move was as a firefighter and we first see him leaping out of a burning building, carrying a child under his arm. Kline agrees to go back on one condition: that he cooks dinner for his brother's wife (the fantastically haughty Susan Sarandon), a former girlfriend for whom he still holds a candle. The pace hots up, Nick finds himself a new girlfriend, the mayor's daughter Bernadette (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), whose main cl to fame is that her best friend was murdered by the serial killer. Oh, and of course he gets the guy, in the nick of time (literally). Confused? You won't be. The plot is an improbable potion of coincidences and divine inspiration but it's not complicated. Kline overcomes the shortcomings of the script with a charmer of a performance, but the real star is the funny, sly Alan Rickman. The January Man is worth seeing for some very fine individual turns (Sarandon is terrific), but in all honesty, it doesn't add up to a great movie, mainly because it can't quite decide what it wants to be, genre-wise, settling on an uneasy compromise of comedy and thriller. On the DVD: The January Man disc has absolutely no-frills. Picture and sound are perfectly adequate without being anything to write home about. And if you're looking for extra goodies, you'll be disappointed: there's the original theatrical trailer and a wide array of subtitle languages, but that's it. --Harriet Smith

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