Movie: Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford, 1984)
The second movie in a row to kick it up a notch when it gets to Mexico! That is where Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges) finds Jessie Wyler (Rachel Ward). Jessie's mum (Jane Greer) is the new owner of the LA Outlaws, the American football team that has just cut the injured Terry. Sleazy bookie Jake Wise (James Woods) sees this as a great opportunity to use Terry, paying him to search for his dissappeared lover Jessie. It's the kind of situation where nobody needs Terry and Jessie to fall in love, but, alas, they quickly find out they have the hots for each other.
Against All Odds is more interested in being a Chinatown knockoff than in being a Body Heat knockoff, but it's much better at being the latter. Bridges and Ward have such great chemistry, it becomes very easy to root for them, especially once it becomes clear that Jessie is no femme fatale. She is the one that makes the first move in Mexico, and Hackford films many of the sex scenes from her perspective, highlighting the joy and pleasure she gets out of it. Usually in films like this that means that she is leading her lover on. Here she has no ulterior motive, which leads to a very convincing erotically charged love story.
It's not just the romance that serves as eye candy. A street race between Terry and Jake is mostly about showcasing the speed and glamour of Ferrari and Porsche A crucial scene set in a nightclub takes its time to evoke the fancy atmosphere of the place with its hypermodern design, its well dressed attendees and its glitzy stage performers. Naturally, there is also lots of driving on brightly lit streets, often to reach offices with ridiculously expensive interioir decorationg, including giant windows overlooking the city. There is not a single shot in which Los Angeles doesn't look like the prettiest place in the world. The same goes for Mexico. Of course, you can't justify a greyed out yellow sheen if you are the first movie in the world allowed to film in Chichen Itza. The film takes maximum advantage of having the mysterious Mayan ruins as a backdrup.
I am a fan of 80's/90's visually appealing romantic thrillers, especially when they are filled with a bunch of great lead and character actors given roles perfectly tailored to them. This would have been one of the better ones if it was satisfied being that. But Against All Odds is more ambitious and also want to be a serious social commentary on the relationship between sports, politics and business. The owners of the LA Outlaws are shown to not care about American football and use the team to gain support for a construction project that would destroy a mountain. I get that the World Cup in Qatar was a long way from happening in 1984, but presenting rich and powerful folks using sports for their own personal gain, and to the detriment of athletes, as some new development was ridiculous even then. All of this also happens in the most predicatble way possible, and is way less exciting than the increasingly knotty relationship between Jessie, Jake and Terry. While our rooting interests are clear, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which all these roles are reversed. All three of them are partly to blame for the situation they are in, and everyone's actions are mostly guided by self-interest.
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