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...But Secret Friends fails as mind teaser, too, because too many of its narrative twists can be easily anticipated.This movie testifies more strongly to Potter's work ethic than to his art...

...Final Analysis is the movie for you, especially if Body Heat left you feeling queasy...

...If Gina Bellman seems more lively, it's only because the script lets her contrast the behaviors of mousey wife and sexy prostitute, both of which she enacts admirably...

...And inadequate...

...Long after we have guessed that the modestly dressed woman in Bates's home and the slit-skirted temptress in the London hotel are one and the same person, Potter is still trying to titillate us with identification games...

...The gifted Eric Roberts lends the movie tension with another of his psycho-macho portraits, and an actor whose name I didn't jot down plays Gere's psychiatric mentor lovably as the reincarnation of Aaron Copland...

...A man on a train (Alan Bates) is quite obviously having an emotional breakdown...

...He wastes so much time teasing us that he doesn't give himself enough time to open the characters up and make them truly complex and interesting...

...This method made sense in Last Year because that film was about doubt: how can we know if a love affair took place if the male affirms that it did while the female denies it...

...There's so much fancy cinematic and narrative cakewalking in this movie that both the roots and the results of the hero's 24: 27 March 1992 Commonweal problem are scanted...

...It does not...

...What decisively sinks the movie is the script concocted by Wesley Strick, whose preposterous work on Scorseses's Cape Fear contributed to that film's odiousness...

...Or has he merely imagined the deed...

...By the end of Secret Friends, the puzzle pieces all fall into place but we couldn't care less...

...Now, if only Potter the talented writer would give his artistic doppelganger, Potter the accomplished director, something interesting to work on...

...The premise is interesting...

...To his credit, though, he gets a surprisingly adequate performance from the beautiful beast Uma Thurman, by emphasizing her spaciness instead of trying to conceal it and by not giving her any speeches comprising more than two consecutive sentences...

...For his first directorial effort, he's written a script that's very busy yet quite cold, extremely intricate, and utterly hollow...

...Bates's virtuosity is impressive, but watching him here is like watching a great juggler discover how many ways he can juggle one ball...

...Then she falls into the Pacific ocean...

...This not only exhausts the viewer's patience but limits Alan Bates as an actor...

...First, the motives for the putative crime are all grounded in the neurosis of Bates's character...

...Of course, the fun of jigsaw puzzles is in the assembly, not the final result...

...There seem to me two reasons why this is so...

...The latter film, you will recall, presented in its final reel a bewildered William Hurt taken completely to the cleaners by Kathleen Turner, whose brilliant scheming ensnared the poor booby into eliminating her husband and going to prison for it while Turner retired to the sands of Acapulco and the arms of beach boys...

...As the film enters his mind we begin to understand that he fears he has murdered his wife (Gina Bellman) in a fit of insanity...

...With only one note to hit, he does his best to hit it with varying degrees of force, from different points of attack...

...Second, Potter seems to underrate our ability at jigsaw-puzzle solving...

...The psychosis isn't just an important component of the role, it is the role...

...Emotionally in love with his wife, he forces her to disguise herself as a call girl so that they can have sex, but then his feelings curdle murderously at the effectiveness of the disguise...

...Strick doesn't plot...

...Did Potter, an enormously gifted writer ("Pennies from Heaven," Dreamchild, Gorky Park, "The Singing Detective") give himself this schematic script as an exercise so that he could worry less about characterization than about where to place actors and camera...

...If Susan Faludi ever puts out a second edition of her book about the backlash against feminism, Final Analysis should rate at least a footnote...

...But this is absolutely all there is to Bates's character...

...But Richard Gere and Kim Basinger must never, never, never act together again...

...That old British standby, the puritanism of middle-class parents, is pressed into duty yet again as an explanation of what's wrong with the hero, and a nice heart-to-heart with the wife in bed seems to clear everything up at the end...

...Until the last few minutes resolve the mystery, Potter devotes his story not to the immediate circumstances of the real or imagined crime, but to the reasons why such a murder might have been committed by this particular man...

...And long after we have guessed that the phantom who looks exactly like Bates and who promises to do his murder for him is, in fact, Bates's imaginary doppelganger (the "secret friend" of the title), Potter feels the need to explain the childhood origins of this double in a long, not very interesting monologue with which Bates embarrasses a dinner party...

...If so, he certainly has come through creditably as a technician...

...In Final Analysis, Kim Basinger almost tricks the psychiatrist played by Richard Gere into falling into the same sort of trap, but he brilliantly reverses the process in the last third of the movie, reducing her to the screaming meemies before she receives her final comeuppance...

...He even gets to lecture the poor murderess (on top of a lighthouse in a raging storm, no less) about how sick she is as the result of an episode of childhood incest...

...he just rams improbabilities together in order to create noise and bloodshed...

...This is at least the second movie they've made together (I had the misfortune to catch No Mercy on TV recently), so I assume they've been told by their handlers that their pairing is a triumph of star chemistry...

...nsecure males, take note...

...The method makes even more sense for Secret Friends because that subject is not only doubt (did Bates murder his wife or not...

...But making sense and giving pleasure are different things...

...This is a man who cannot function sexually except in the arms of whores, yet who also harbors an extreme detestation of whorishness...

...The choice of camera angles, the duration of each shot, the alternation of fixed shots with long smooth pans, are all excellent...

...All very tidy...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Commonweal 27 March 1992: 25...

...But does it work as a thriller...

...Every scene, every flashback, every exchange of dialogue, relates to this sexual aberration, yet there is no exploration of it, only reiteration that the neurosis exists...

...but the sort of extreme anguish that can scramble chronology in the mind of the sufferer...

...But when a chemical reaction takes place, isn't energy given off...

...Potter's narrative method is one used in certain films of the I960s and early '70s, all of which were inspired by Last Year at Marienbad: short, nonconsecutive scenes (sometimes no more than single-shot glimpses of an action) that don't unfold a linear story but challenge us to assemble the story ourselves...

...Phil Joanou's direction is so soporific that you watch even the high-tech action sequences in an uncaring daze...

...That would be a not-so-secret act of friendship from which we could all benefit...

...He weeps hysterically as he stares down at his luncheon fish but can't communicate to conductor and passengers the turmoil in his brain...