Directed by: Kaige Chen
Written by:Kara Lindstrom
Starring: Heather Graham, Joseph Fiennes, Natascha McElhone, Ian Hart
Released: November 28, 2002
Grade: C

Yikes, what a stinker!  On paper, you’d think actors like Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes wouldn’t even glance twice as such a pitiful script.  Their agents should have shredded the paper as soon as it arrived.  But somehow, that which should not have happened, unfortunately has.

Hmmm, let me try to make some sense out of this script although thanks to some dodgy editing and screenplay full of holes, there are some elements that may never be explained.  Alice (Graham) is pretty content with life and has a nice boyfriend.  Walking to work one morning, she reaches to push the pedestrian button at a set of streetlights only to find another gentlemen (Fiennes) pushing the button at the same time.

Their eyes meet - oh my god, it’s true love.  So they wind up going back to his place and making love, um, quite a few times.  The next day, she finds out his name, Adam, and more about him.  He’s a renowned mountain climber who’s previous girlfriend was killed in a nasty avalanche.  Alice immediately breaks up with her current boyfriend, and soon Alice and Adam are married and living together.

But Alice receives notes in the mail and mysterious telephone calls.  They warn her to leave Adam before it is too late.  This suddenly creates doubt in Alice - exactly how much does she know about her husband’s past?  Should she put faith in him or is it time to start investigating the truth in these messages?

Quite frankly, I couldn’t care.  The ending is ludicrous and doesn’t even answer half the questions - that’s really frustrating.  There’s some unusually steamy sex early on in the production to give a bit of spice but it slides away from there.  Everyone just behaves so stupidly and so forcibly to make the script work.

In a quiet theatre (with not too many patrons I might add), the term Killing Me Softly is quite apt.  It’s how I felt sitting there watching that screen.  So please, make sure that you don’t end up feeling the same way - and just see something else!