James Hitchcock This film was recently screened on British television under its alternative title "Lethal Seduction"; my main reason for watching it was that it starred Melanie Griffith, who was regarded as a major star during her heyday n the eighties and early nineties but of whom little seems to have been heard recently. The last film I remember seeing her in was Adrian Lyne's remake of "Lolita" from 1997.Unfortunately, "Heartless" perhaps demonstrates why Melanie's career has not been as successful in middle age as it was in her youth. To be frank, even in her heyday she was something of a one-trick pony, specialising in playing sexy blonde bimbos, or at least (as in "Working Girl", probably her best film) girls who are wrongly thought of as bimbos but who turn out to have hidden depths. Her attempts to escape from her comfort zone and to broaden her range as an actress have never struck me as very successful. The one exception was perhaps "A Stranger Among Us", where she was good as a police officer, but I was never convinced by her portrayal of a tough sci-fi heroine in "Cherry 2000" or of a tough wartime secret agent in "Shining Through".In "Lethal Seduction" Melanie's character, Miranda Wells, is again supposed to be a tough cookie, but whereas Edith in "Cherry 2000" and Linda in "Shining Through" were both heroines, Miranda is the villain of this particular story. She is a Louisiana lawyer who has been ripping off her clients, mostly poor Mexican immigrants, charging them exorbitant sums in exchange for a promise that she will be able to procure for them a coveted Green Card, which of course never materialises. A young investigative journalist named David Lopez gets a job under a false name with Miranda's law firm, hoping to expose her shady practices. Unfortunately, Miranda finds herself attracted to the handsome young man, and they begin an affair, which puts him in a difficult position; those who have crossed Miranda in the past, including her former lovers, have tended to come to a sticky end.Unfortunately, the role required a depth of characterisation which Melanie is quite unable to bring to it. She might have been able to portray a seductive temptress in "The Bonfire of the Vanities", but fifteen years later this art had clearly deserted her. Much of the problem lies with her voice and her seeming inability to speak in anything other than the kind of breathy, high-pitched little girl's tones which may have served her well in her youth but which sounded ridiculous on the lips of a woman in her late forties. Some actresses might have succeeded in making Miranda a memorable villainess, but Melanie gives a wooden and unconvincing performance, which means that the film as a whole is a failure. None of the other actors are particularly good, but this does not matter so much as the other characters, even David, are little more than ciphers; Miranda should have been the pivot around which the whole thing revolves.When the film was shown in Britain, it was billed as being based on a true story, which I found difficult to credit. For all Miranda's villainy she is supposed to be a highly skilled lawyer whose brilliance in the courtroom manages to secure her own acquittal on any serious charges of wrongdoing. (Although as a lawyer myself I was less impressed by her supposedly brilliant powers of cross-examination than the scriptwriters evidently were. A jury would probably have the intelligence to realise that an investigative journalist needs to assume false identities as part of his work and that the assumption of such an identity does not necessarily mean that he is dishonest or an unreliable witness). Were this film really based upon fact, the real Miranda Wells, or the person upon whom she is supposedly based, would have a good course of action in defamation against the film-makers. 3/10

elshikh4 This is the closest you can ever have to a sleeping pill. Actually the tedium here comes with so many ways (maybe all the known ways!), being the most hypnotist thriller I've seen, I know that I fell asleep more than once during the watching ! A lot of people don't perceive that weariness could come from many uncommon sources, one of them is the voice's rhythm, and I do not need to remind anyone how Miss. Griffith got one of the most boring voices EVER ! Yet her way of delivering her lines reaches to the next level of provocation this time ! Listen to her, OH MY GOD, scene like the one in which she screams to one of the characters "You're My Whore !" seemed really laughable with her damn child-like tone. And aside from the fact that in the history of "bad performance" she had a genuine signature, her face here looked horrible with a capital H ! She became a total freak out of too many plastic surgeries. Her face appeared as unpolished plastic mask, reflecting the lights like a badly-made Barbie doll ! And when it comes to her lips…well, let's not bring up the matter of the lips ! So how about acting as a femme fatal in the same freaking time ?? (lethal seduction indeed!). She made it clear through this work : Death Becomes Her wasn't fiction story, it's a fact a lot of Hollywood stars live it, wanna witness it yourself, so watch this TV movie!. I hated everything about it. While the plot is not bad, the characters are poor, the narration is so dull, and the directing is nonexistent. Somebody should've told the invisible director earlier that there are elements to make the thrill, the suspense, the movies ! but obviously nobody did. It's ideally tasteless (even the painting of the lead on the wall was awful!). It's rare when I say about one movie "what a waste of time and money"… This is unmistakably one of them. If there is ever a DVD for it, just buy it to burn it and extricate the world from one version of it ! Otherwise, it's great cure if insomnia is the problem ! Ahh… where is Dina Meyer when you need one ?!

guidomaschio I was really surprised to see Melanie Griffith into this very modest flick. Usually she is a great actress and a very seductive woman, but here the way she portrays the bad lawyer doesn't work. But I don't blame her too much because the plot is ridiculous and the plot holes are bigger than Mount Everest.I.e. when Mr. Vierra (the rich Griffith lover) is killed no one investigates her only because at the murdering hour she was at home with her assistant. But the man was murdered with a heavy stick that smashed his head: so why does everyone only consider the hypothesis that she performed the assassination with her own hands? Since the start everyone knows that the woman is a manipulator, so the first logical thing to do was to suspect her as the crime sender. There was even a witness that saw an angry Mr Vierra expelling Mrs. Wells out of his office, causing her to seriously threaten him. But no one cares; it seems that because she was at home she could not be related in any ways to the murdering of the man that dumped her only days before. Dumb.Subsequently she tries to be recognized as the murdered rich man's wife in order to get his inheritance ... and still the police isn't interested to investigate her involvement with the murder. Dumber. The characters behavior isn't believable, the plot leads nowhere, Melanie Griffith - that shows occasionally some of her seductive side - mostly goes through the scenes like a sleepwalker and her various criminal connections are so evident that it's not believable that no one tries to incriminate her for the killings.3 out of 10 - Avoid it.

SpeedyGonsales Melanie is a great actress, but she was not ideal for this role. Better choice would be Nicole Kidman (which already played "bad girl" in a movie - "To die for").She's playing lawyer who worships only one thing in life: money, and for it she's ready to go to incredible depth.She's playing woman who adores carnal pleasures, both with older men (which she tries to use for money), or younger (which she uses for fun), and as she was convicting in her early movies "Somethin wild" as wild girl, now that kind of role doesn't suit her anymore.This is "To die for", with another goal in main woman head, and men are only boys in her net, and unfortunately it is not convicting enough.Esai Morales is solid, but they both should try more to give us fun, if not quality content.