Mickey Rourke is the titular thug, a criminal with very profound facial deformities including a cleft palate that renders his speech unintelligible to most folks. He's approached by old friend Scott Wilson who needs money to get himself out of debt to unsavory types, so Rourke plans a robbery that will yield that cash. Wilson brings along completely untrustworthy couple Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin, who predictably betray them ... killing Wilson, taking the money and leaving Rourke for the cops.
Rourke refuses to tell cop Morgan Freeman anything, and goes to jail. In jail he's approached by doctor Forest Whitaker who offers him experimental reconstructive surgery and speech therapy and a possible new life. Soon Rourke looks like Rourke, and he's out on a work release where he falls into a romance with Elizabeth Montgomery.
With this pretty phenomenal cast and Walter Hill at the helm, this film should work like gangbusters, but it only barely works. The problem is that you damn well know Rourke is going to go after Henriksen and Barkin, and you don't just know because you know how movies like this work ... you know because everyone in the movie just repeatedly tells you he's going after them.
So the really quite lengthy segments with Whitaker and Montgomery are just treading water, and by the time you get to the meat of the film and Rourke approaches Barkin, there's no time left to have anything more than a fairly dull, perfunctory revenge play out. Rourke's plan is really quite weird and never fully explained, and it feels like it would have been 1000 times easier for him to just shoot the pair in the half dozen scenes where they are alone.
It's not a bad film. It's difficult to believe that Hill could make a bad film with a cast this great. It's stylish and often fun ... just not fun enough.
Rourke refuses to tell cop Morgan Freeman anything, and goes to jail. In jail he's approached by doctor Forest Whitaker who offers him experimental reconstructive surgery and speech therapy and a possible new life. Soon Rourke looks like Rourke, and he's out on a work release where he falls into a romance with Elizabeth Montgomery.
With this pretty phenomenal cast and Walter Hill at the helm, this film should work like gangbusters, but it only barely works. The problem is that you damn well know Rourke is going to go after Henriksen and Barkin, and you don't just know because you know how movies like this work ... you know because everyone in the movie just repeatedly tells you he's going after them.
So the really quite lengthy segments with Whitaker and Montgomery are just treading water, and by the time you get to the meat of the film and Rourke approaches Barkin, there's no time left to have anything more than a fairly dull, perfunctory revenge play out. Rourke's plan is really quite weird and never fully explained, and it feels like it would have been 1000 times easier for him to just shoot the pair in the half dozen scenes where they are alone.
It's not a bad film. It's difficult to believe that Hill could make a bad film with a cast this great. It's stylish and often fun ... just not fun enough.