Berlin. After a botched deal to sell art forgery in an apartment, Tom Ripley kills a butler of a rich collector, takes the money and escapes, ending his cooperation with British gangster Reeves. However, three years later, there he is again: Reeves encounters Ripley again in Veneto. Ripley recommends Jonathan, an art framer who insulted him at a party and who is dying of leukemia, to become an assassin for 100,000$. Jonathan begrudgingly accepts in order to leave money for his wife and son after his death. Jonathan goes to a zoo and shoots a criminal, Belinsky, who was observing insects there. Reeves then offers Jonathan another assassination in a train, but it must be done with a noose. Ripley shows up in the train and helps Jonathan strangle the mafioso and two of his bodyguards in a toilet. However, now the mafia sends their own assassins against Jonathan and Ripley. Jonathan is killed in his home, while Ripley kills his assassins. Ripley then goes to a concert of his lover.
Even though it's not as great as Wenders' first film adaptation filmed 35 years prior, "The American Friend", Liliana Cavani's take on Patricia Highsmith's eponymous novel, "Ripley's Game" is a clever and subtle psychological thriller that starts off deceivingly lukewarm and meandering in its first 20 minutes, but once it starts going, its intrigue factor just keeps growing exponentially. John Malkovich isn't that charismatic here as he could have been, but is still a very good fit as the anti-hero Tom Ripley, a cold, distant, opportunistic, autistic criminal who cannot understand humans. In one memorable sequence, after capturing an assassin at his mansion, Ripley tells him to phone his boss and claim he mistook Ripley for the perpetrator: "If you don't do it convincingly, I take you out back, and I run my tractor over your head the rest of the day. Okay?" In another sequence, while driving a car, he says to Jonathan: "You know the most interesting thing about doing something terrible? After a few days, you can't even remember it." These kind of moments are good examples of a knack for dialogue. The first murder is disappointingly easy and smooth: the hapless Jonathan sneaks behind the back of a mafioso, simply shoots him and walks away. A little more dilemma and fear on Jonathan's side would have worked much better. However, the second murder, on a train headed for Düsseldorf, is much better set up, creating not only suspense but also intolerable anxiety for Jonathan and Ripley when everything goes wrong, since the murder has to be perpetrated by strangling with a noose, which becomes an impossibe challenge. As a fallout, the mafia then starts sending assassins against Jonathan and Ripley, leading to even more chaos and unpredictability. While the movie has several flaws—its visual style is bland and conventional; it needed more character study of Ripley's persona—once it grips you, it doesn't let you go. With time, others started paying respect towards the film, too, as it was the case with Roger Ebert who included it in his list of Great Movies.
Grade:+++
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