Love at Large

Writer/director Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, Choose Me) has a penchant for coming up with great stories that he turns into wonderful-to-look-at-but-boring movies that are invariably miscast. Love at Large has an ingenious premise: Harry (Tom Berenger), a gruff private eye is hired to follow a guy named Rick and report to his client Miss Dolan (Anne Archer). Unfortunately, Harry follows the wrong guy: one Frederick King (Ted Levine), who's married with children--in two different states. While tailing King/McGraw, Harry discovers that he's being followed by Stella (Elizabeth Perkins), who's been hired by his girlfriend Doris. Some wonderful complications should arise out of all this, but they do not. It takes about ninety of the ninety-seven minutes of the movie just to figure out what the hell is going on. But by then it's a little bit too late to appreciate the cleverness of the plot. Most people will have had quite enough of Harry by then. The miscast Berenger plays him with a forced gruffy mumble that sounds sort of like Lurch (from The Addams Family) on uppers. Not recommended. (R. Pitman) [Blu-ray/DVD Review—Dec. 15, 2015—Kino Lorber, 97 min., R, DVD: $19.95, Blu-ray: $29.95—Making its latest appearance on DVD and debut on Blu-ray, 1990's Love at Large features a decent transfer and a DTS-HD 2.0 soundtrack on the Blu-ray release, but no extras. Bottom line: one of director Alan Rudolph's cinematic misfires, this is for completists only.]