Voodoo Dawn

Michael Madsen specializes in a certain sort of minimalist antihero, men of action who treat even the most outlandish events as business as usual. It's a character Madsen played to great effect in such superb neo-noirs as Reservoir Dogs and Kill Me Again, and to much lesser effect in countless direct-to-video thrillers such as the new Voodoo Dawn. Madsen stars as a tight-lipped, stoic tough guy, a voodoo-happy bar owner whose less-than-enlightened nature is revealed when he refers to his top waitress (Rosanna Arquette, playing the latest in a series of washed-up sexpots) as the shiniest object he owns. Seeking to exploit the Desperately Seeking Susan star's fabled shininess for his own gain, Madsen dispatches Arquette to rope depressed ex-con Balthazar Getty into a desperate scheme involving a bag of money with a particularly wicked voodoo curse placed upon it. True to form, the ever-understated Madsen performs the rare act of voodoo with the vague determination of an office drone filling out a football pool, while a shrill Arquette adds a shaky Cajun drawl to her growing repertoire of unconvincing accents. Stingily parceling out its supernatural aspects like T&A in a timid teen-sex comedy, Voodoo Dawn takes itself fatally seriously, treating its grim, overwritten script like a lost work of Jim Thompson rather than B-movie camp. The vastly superior Cast A Deadly Spell attempted a similar juxtaposition of hard-boiled pulp fiction and supernatural horror, but did so in the form of a surreal, tongue-in-cheek comic fantasy. With Voodoo Dawn, the supernatural elements just make an unintentionally silly film even sillier.