Love Walked In

Any thought that Juan José Campanella's directorial debut might be a blithe romantic comedy vanishes with the opening image: an eviscerated cat. Things don't get much more appetizing in the course of this sour mish-mash of Indecent Proposal and Deconstructing Harry with a soupçon of The Fabulous Baker Boys. Denis Leary adds to his screen-career snafus as Jack Morrissey, an embittered, recovering alcoholic who's failed at music and writing and makes a pittance in a nightclub by playing back-up piano for his chanteuse wife, Vicky (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), and by grousing about rich people in weary, unfunny monologues. Fred Moore (Terence Stamp, looking confused out of drag), one of these rich people, is amused by Jack's prattle, and more taken by his wife. Spurred by a private-investigator buddy, Jack and Vicky plot to have her seduce the married Moore and then blackmail him. The expected happens, in a sense, twice. It seems Jack hasn't quite given up his writing aspirations and is typing away a bloated pulp novel of bogus good and evil paralleling his own story, which we get to see enacted. With Love, the time to walk out is when the cat gets it. At the Copley Place and the Janus and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough