Don't worry - I'll warn you before I reveal any spoilers. Read on in good faith.
Arthur Penn: Great. 18-year-old-naked-Melanie-Griffith: Excellent. Gene Hackman: Awesome. This film: pile of garbage. The acting is great, the filmography is wonderfully dark and moody, most of the dialog is solid. I don't understand how the whole can be so much less than the sum of its parts, but this film manages to pull it off somehow. For context, I am a huge fan of the 1970's European-inspired cinema veritas movement and some of my favorite films are from this time period, and some are by Arthur Penn ("Little Big Man", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Rocky"). But this steaming pile of a film takes "cinema veritas" to the level of "cinema literal": everything you see is exactly what you think it is. The only reason I gave this film a 5 instead of a 1 is because all the individual parts were so good that it kept me watching.
Before I get all spoilery, let me recommend some films that you should watch instead of "Night Moves" (which you should NEVER watch, IMO). If you want to see Arthur Penn at his best, watch "Little Big Man" and "Bonnie and Clyde". If you want to see a mix of American cinema veritas at the top of its form watch "Chinatown", "Taxi Driver", and "Easy Rider". If you want to see the reason that Gene Hackman is probably one of the best American actors EVER, watch "The Conversation", "The French Connection", "Unforgiven", "Hoosiers", hell almost anything other than "Night Moves".
SPOILERS AHEAD!===========================================
I wanted to point out two specific things that I found particularly terrible about this film.
The Plot: As I said above, everything you see is exactly what it is. Does it seem like a girl is having a sexual relationship with her step-father? She is. Is a guy crawling underneath car just before it crashes messing with the brakes? You bet. Is the greedy mother setting up her daughter to be killed to inherit her fortune? Absolutely! If the plot itself wasn't so dead-simple and obvious, this might have been forgivable. But when you know exactly what happened before it even happens, it's a travesty. For example, "Chinatown", which this film desperately wants to be, did this very well.
The Ending: WOW, I have rarely seen a contrived ending as blatant as this one. It's clear that Penn wants Moseby to pay for his sins, but the behaviors of the characters in the last 15 minutes of the film are completely unbelievable. There was absolutely no reason for Paula to take Moseby to the smuggled loot. There was no reason for Joey to skim the plane along the water and run over Paula. There's no way that Paula wouldn't hear the plane coming! There's no reason that Moseby couldn't have crawled into the driver's seat and piloted the boat. He had one 9 mm bullet wound to the thigh - this would in no way be debilitating enough for his lazy performance at the end of the film, putting the boat into a symbolic circular course and laying down to die. Seriously, this was the worst part of an already terrible film.
Arthur Penn: Great. 18-year-old-naked-Melanie-Griffith: Excellent. Gene Hackman: Awesome. This film: pile of garbage. The acting is great, the filmography is wonderfully dark and moody, most of the dialog is solid. I don't understand how the whole can be so much less than the sum of its parts, but this film manages to pull it off somehow. For context, I am a huge fan of the 1970's European-inspired cinema veritas movement and some of my favorite films are from this time period, and some are by Arthur Penn ("Little Big Man", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Rocky"). But this steaming pile of a film takes "cinema veritas" to the level of "cinema literal": everything you see is exactly what you think it is. The only reason I gave this film a 5 instead of a 1 is because all the individual parts were so good that it kept me watching.
Before I get all spoilery, let me recommend some films that you should watch instead of "Night Moves" (which you should NEVER watch, IMO). If you want to see Arthur Penn at his best, watch "Little Big Man" and "Bonnie and Clyde". If you want to see a mix of American cinema veritas at the top of its form watch "Chinatown", "Taxi Driver", and "Easy Rider". If you want to see the reason that Gene Hackman is probably one of the best American actors EVER, watch "The Conversation", "The French Connection", "Unforgiven", "Hoosiers", hell almost anything other than "Night Moves".
SPOILERS AHEAD!===========================================
I wanted to point out two specific things that I found particularly terrible about this film.
The Plot: As I said above, everything you see is exactly what it is. Does it seem like a girl is having a sexual relationship with her step-father? She is. Is a guy crawling underneath car just before it crashes messing with the brakes? You bet. Is the greedy mother setting up her daughter to be killed to inherit her fortune? Absolutely! If the plot itself wasn't so dead-simple and obvious, this might have been forgivable. But when you know exactly what happened before it even happens, it's a travesty. For example, "Chinatown", which this film desperately wants to be, did this very well.
The Ending: WOW, I have rarely seen a contrived ending as blatant as this one. It's clear that Penn wants Moseby to pay for his sins, but the behaviors of the characters in the last 15 minutes of the film are completely unbelievable. There was absolutely no reason for Paula to take Moseby to the smuggled loot. There was no reason for Joey to skim the plane along the water and run over Paula. There's no way that Paula wouldn't hear the plane coming! There's no reason that Moseby couldn't have crawled into the driver's seat and piloted the boat. He had one 9 mm bullet wound to the thigh - this would in no way be debilitating enough for his lazy performance at the end of the film, putting the boat into a symbolic circular course and laying down to die. Seriously, this was the worst part of an already terrible film.