Cinema
The Glimmer Man (18, selected cinemas)
A mellow maverick
Mark Steyn
You're from New York. You cracked the De Marco case. Well, this ain't New York, and this ain't the De Marco case.' Film is fundamentally a reassuring medi- um: its technical vocabulary and conven- tions were established decades ago, and, for most of us, the pleasure in a movie lies in how close it comes to other movies we like. The Glimmer Man is like all the other cop films you've ever seen and yet is strangely satisfying. It's directed by John Gray and written by Kevin Brodbin Brodbin by name, bread bin by nature, for his script seems to have been assembled entirely from stale, half-baked slices from other people's recipes.
The Glimmer Man himself, Lieutenant Jack Cole, is, of course, a maverick cop, as all movie cops are. In motion pictures, a truly maverick cop would be, paradoxically, a highly conventional one — doggedly going by the book, even though he's sur- rounded by an entire department of maver- icks. In the meantime, the conventional approach is represented by the reluctant sidekick: for every Glimmer Man, there's a dimmer man, and these days they tend to be black, like Keenan Ivory Wayans here. His function is to tell his partner every ten minutes, 'Man, they gonna bust your ass.'
As asses go, the Glimmer Man's is a hard one to bust. In the person of beefy Steven Seagal, it's very broad, almost as broad as his performance. Seagal's Lieutenant Cole comes burdened with character traits, which enable us to distinguish him from all the other maverick cops. The Glimmer Man's niche is that he's a mellow maverick: he speaks softly, he has a ponytail, he drinks herbal tea, he's a Buddhist and he wears Tibetan prayer beads — 'I use them to calm my mind,' he says calmly. He's called the Glimmer Man because, back in Vietnam, he was so fast you only caught a glimmer of him. It's not like that here. The punks and hoods can see Cole coming from miles off because, for discreet police surveillance work, he favours gold lame Nehru jackets in extravagant spiralling pat- terns. He's less of a sleek Glimmer Man than a lumbering Mattress Man — a well- sprung queen, in every sense.
That's the other odd thing about this all- action film: never mind a homoerotic sub- text, the whole picture has a swishy air. The megalomaniac bent on world domination is gay, and his relationship with his principal contract killer, Donald, is most curious. The hero, as he sashays from one serial killing to another, has a very effete walk for an action hero. True, he has a wife and an ex-wife, one of whom is dead and one of whom isn't, but, frankly, it doesn't seem to make much difference. Instead, he saves most of the sexual chemistry for his side- kick, whose only characteristic is that he's insecure about his manhood. The Glimmer Man supplies the slimmer man with a herbal remedy for his allergies, made from a deer's penis. 'It's OK,' a sneezing Wayans tells one contact, 'I'm gonna be sucking a dedr's penis later on.' As running jokes go, the deer's penis is very limp.
Wayans also likes old movies, especially Bette Davis in Dark Victory, though he doesn't like Lieutenant Cole to see him sobbing helplessly. At this point, I remem- bered that there was a real Jack Cole in Hollywood — he was the choreographer of The Jolson Story and taught Marilyn Mon- roe how to dance.
But I don't want to make it sound as if this is an action movie for nancy boys. All the time-honoured conventions are here, often with pleasantly inspired variations. When we get to the scene where the Cap- tain demands that the Glimmer Man turn in his badge, it takes place in the men's room. 'Which one of these did you just piss in?' asks Seagal, and tosses his badge in the urinal. Perhaps the most surprising innova- tion comes during the autopsy. 'Anything else about the body?' asks Seagal. 'She got nice tits,' says Wayans. 'Yes, but a little too nice,' says Seagal, and with his knife makes a quick incision, reaches in and pulls out a silicone implant. From the manufacturer's number, he's able to identify the body.
It would be unreasonable to expect them to maintain this level of creativity, and they don't. The bad guys, as they often are these days, are the Russian Mafia; there's a serial killer and, equally inevitably, a CIA man called 'Smith' who's gone over to the other side. The only real mystery is why 'Smith' is played, with a Southern accent, by the RSC's Brian Cox. As Hollywood sell-outs by British actors go, even Claire Bloom knew enough to pick a Stallone vehicle rather than Steven Seagal.
Previous page
