Gloria

In the film annals of "Just What Were They Thinking?!" -dom, this Sidney Lumet directed film deserves a prominent place. Lumet, whose past work includes such screen classics as 12 Angry Men, Network, and Serpico, has given us a serio-comic thriller with a lead performance so painfully bad that it has to be seen to be believed. For the still curious, Sharon Stone plays Gloria, a tuff-tawkin' brassy moll fresh off a Federally-funded three-year Florida vacation she took to spare her mobster boyfriend Kevin the inconvenience of imprisonment. Upon her release she violates her parole in a matter of minutes, hopping a bus back to her boy in NYC. When she arrives, she finds that Kevin's henchmen have just wiped out an entire family to recover a computer disk that (very unwisely) held the incriminating details of their entire criminal operation, and that the sole survivor of that familial bloodbath, a street-savvy six-year old named Nicky, is in Kevin's custody. When she learns that the boss's boys plan to send the youngster permanently packing as well, Gloria swipes the kid and the disc at gunpoint, after which they both become targets of the mob. To make a long review short, the only thing worse than Stone's performance is her ridiculously over-the-top 'New Yawk' accent. Life's too short to waste waxing on just how bad this film is, so I'll just expound on the film's tagline--"Gloria: Big mouth. Big attitude. Big trouble." Big mistake. (S. C. Sickles)