To that end, he has sent for a mail order bride from America named Julia Russell who shocks him when she shows up looking like Angelina Jolie rather than the much plainer woman in the pictures he'd been sent. Perhaps there's simply no amount of Angelina Jolie nudity (and there is a ton in this movie) that doesn't get canceled out when the story is all about the emasculation of the male protagonist.īased on the novel "Waltz into Darkness" by Cornell Wollrich (which was previously adapted by Francois Truffaut as Mississippi Mermaid, which starred Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo), Original Sin is set in late 19th century Cuba and centers on Luis Vargas (Banderas), a coffee plantation owner who has amassed great wealth but longs for a wife to share his life and have children with him. Yet, when the film came out in the summer of 2001, audiences reacted with complete indifference and the film sunk like a stone at the box office.
By 2001, however, the genre had been out of favor for years, though I can see why MGM thought this could be the film to revive it: it had Angelina Jolie, fresh off her Oscar win and a hit in Tomb Raider, and Antonio Banderas, doing his Latin lover thing, fresh off a hit of his own in the form of Spy Kids, and it got a decent amount of press with regards to the sex scenes, with some footage having to be cut in order to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating. It even classes things up a bit by making it a period piece. It has the elements that could have made it a hit during that era: hot actor, hot actress, a sultry, exotic location, a sexual charge combined with sexual danger snaking its way through the story. If Original Sin had come out a decade earlier, early enough to have ridden the wave of "erotic" thrillers that found an audience in the late 80s/early 90s, it might have been a decent sized hit (of course, if it had come out during that era, it probably also would have had to be rewritten so that it could star Michael Douglas). Starring: Angelina Jolie, Antonio Banderas
0 kommentar(er)
