Director Report Card: Ridley Scott (1987)

5. Someone to Watch Over Me

By 1987, Ridley Scott was still best known as the director of “Alien.” Yes, that was an immediately iconic and widely imitated blockbuster but it was also only one movie. “Blade Runner's” influence wouldn't be felt for years and it was regarded as a weird disappointment at the time. “Legend,” meanwhile, was an unambiguous box office failure, its cult following far away. In other words: Ridley Scott needed to prove he could still be a commercial filmmaker. This is when the director would begin a brief work-for-hire period in his career. “Someone to Watch Over Me” was first pitched to Scott by its writer, Howard Franklin, at a party. It must've been a hell of a pitch, as Scott would make the high-concept cop thriller a few years later as his first attempt to regain box office support.

Mike Keegan is a newly appointed NYPD police detective, a humble guy with a wife and son who love him back at home. Claire Gregory is a Manhattan socialite who lives a refined life, of high-class parties and fancy art shows. At one such show, she witnesses an old friend being violently stabbed to death by Joey Venza, an unhinged criminal. Keegan's first assignment is to be Claire's bodyguard, protecting her so she can identify Venza when the police apprehend him. As Keegan spends more time with Claire, an attraction develops between the two. Soon enough, they fall into bed. Not long after that, Venza comes after Claire.

From its opening minutes, “Someone to Watch Over Me” emphasizes the differences between its two characters' world in as obvious a fashion as possible. Keegan is introduced at a party celebrating his promotion. There's lots of shouting from kids and adults. Pop songs of the day play on the radio. People get sloppily drunk and fall over. Claire is introduced at a party in a swanky night club, where women dress are in fancy gowns and the men wear expensive tuxedos. Claire's scenes are largely scored to big band music. After being assigned to take care of her, more than one scene follows of Keegan being baffled and confused by the world of haute couture Claire inhabits. The film really hammers home the differences between this average guy who lives in a small, cramped home in a bad part of town and this glamorous lady who always has on expensive clothes and spends a lot of time at high society gatherings.

Aside from emphasizing the normalcy of Keegan's home life, the film also goes out of its way to make you understand that he really does love his wife and kid. The two have a charming life together. He makes dinner on the weekends. She tries to fix his car for him. He has a quirky rapport with his smart-ass son, who has a bad habit of leaving his skateboards sitting around the house. He wants to move into a better neighborhood, because he cares about their protection so much. I guess the idea is to make sure the audience likes this character and know he's a good human being, even though his entire character arc revolves around him screwing around on his wife.

At this point in his career, Ridley Scott had sometimes been criticized for the slow pace his films exhibited. An infamous review of “Blade Runner” referred to it as “Blade Crawler.” I, personally, didn't have any problem with the pacing in Scott's first four features. “Someone to Watch Over Me,” however, is painfully slow. Keegan and Claire don't actually sleep together until the first hour mark. Up to that point, their relationship is composed of clipped conversations and many tedious scenes of him accompanying her around the city. The most romantic gesture the cop makes towards the woman under his care up to this point is placing his coat over her as she's cold, an interaction so cliched that it can only come off as stilted. From the very beginning, we know these two are going to end up in bed together. Watching the movie creep towards that inevitable event is nothing short of tedious.

Once the two protagonists finally hook up, “Someone to Watch Over Me” attempts to mine as much melodrama out of the fallout from the affair as possible. Keegan feels conflicted over his obvious attraction to Claire. He tries to hide it from his wife, during several painfully drawn out sequence, but it's only a matter of time before she finds out. There's screaming and fighting once that happens and he ends up sleeping on a friend's couch for a while. While watching over Claire, the two trade more meaningful glances and silent glares, afraid to acknowledge what they've done together. Claire calls the affair a mistake before they end up sleeping together again. The movie really wants you to know what a big deal these events are in the lives of their characters.

Unfortunately, there's nothing compelling about the romance at the center of “Someone to Watch Over Me.” As you'd exactly expect, Claire doesn't seem interested in her bodyguard at first. She treats him as an inconvenience, dragging him to his ne of her fancy parties. This leads to the kind of belligerent sexual tension we’ve seen in a hundred romances. As inevitable as it is that Keegan and Claire will have an affair, it’s equally foreseeable that his wife will take him back after he saves their lives. The repeated references to the danger in the neighborhood affect his family. The film is predictable and everything happens exactly when you expect it to. It’s hard to feel too much tension or drama when you know exactly where all of this is headed from scene one. The movie is exactly as trite as it’s high-concept “cop falls in love with the witness he has to protect” premise suggests. 

I don’t know what it was about “Someone to Watch Over Me” that attracted Ridley Scott but the director certainly does his best to elevate the material. One of the film’s earliest shots features rays of light cutting through a moody nightclub. Shortly after that, smoke billowing up from a sewer grate features prominently in another scene. In fact, there’s a lot of white smoke floating up from the streets in this movie, Scott attempting to transport the ambiance of “The Duellist’s” French countryside or the Nostromo to the New York City streets. It’s unmistakably his style, Scott ensuring the movie at least looks nice, 

At the beginning of this review, I referred to “Someone to Watch Over Me” as a thriller. This is technically correct, though most of the movie is devoted to the maudlin romance and personal melodrama of the story. There's really only a handful of scenes that feel like a thriller. When Venza sends a gun-toting thug into Claire's home and when the bad guy himself takes Keegan's wife and kid hostage at the end. The former scene features a pretty cool tracking shot of the thug shooting another cop, a shoot-out in a mirrored dressing room, and lots of that atmospheric Ridley Scott lighting. The climax is similarly dramatically shot and lit. These are the rare moments when "Someone to Watch Over Me" actually comes alive a little bit.

Beyond wanting to direct a movie that might make some money, I can only speculate why Scott chose to direct this one. You can see a little bit of "The Duellists" and "Alien's" working class themes in the stark class divide between Keegan's blue-collar home and Claire's rich lifestyle. Otherwise, "Someone to Watch Over Me" does little to distinguish itself from similar stories like "The Bodyguard." Right down to some typical cop movie crassness, about how hard it is to be an officer, and a less-than-progressive suggestion that Keegan's climatic act of violence is what really assures his wife that he still loves her, that she should forgive him.

Another reason why the movie is so inert is that the stars have little chemistry. Tom Berenger is fine, stiflingly fine, as Keegan. The script never gives him much of a chance to add depth to the character but Berenger does what he can to give a little personality to the part. Mimi Rogers is similarly totally acceptable as Claire. She has plenty of vulnerability, which is about the only likable note the script gives her to play. Yet the two have no sparks, which only furthers the suggestion that the only reason the characters fall in love is because the script says they have to. 

The only performer in the movie who makes much of an impression is Lorraine Bracco as Elle, Keegan's put-upon wife. In one of her earliest screen appearances, Bracco shows plenty of humor and pep as a woman who does her best to support her husband and child. It helps that she might be the only truly sympathetic character in the movie. Andreas Katsulas is serviceable sleazy as Vinza, making for a mildly memorable villain. One also can't help but notice Jerry Orbach, ridiculously overqualified to play a typical balls-busting police chief. 

By the way, if you were curious, the title lending George and Ira Gershwin song plays twice through the film. First as a maudlin cover from Sting over the opening credits and then as a sappy version from Roberta Flack over the end credits. If my suspicions are correct and Scott directed "Someone to Watch Over Me" in the hopes that it would become a hit, that plan backfired. The movie only made ten million dollars against a twelve-million-dollar budget, making it another flop for the filmmaker. The film has slipped largely into obscurity in the years since, being among the most forgotten films of Scott's career. And with good reason, as it's a completely snooze. [Grade: C-]