‘Talented Mr. Ripley’ among year’s best

In theaters

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

Be careful whom you covet.

In “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Anthony Minghella’s provocative take on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is the men’s room attendant who covets too much.

But it’s not just things that Ripley wants — it’s not just money, homes, cars or trinkets. What Ripley, the charismatic-yet-self-loathing sociopath, wants is a new identity, preferably someone else’s, a slick new skin he can slide into in his all-out effort to leave his underwhelming self behind.

If he has to kill and kill and kill to get just that, so be it.

Set in Italy, Minghella’s latest film proves the quality of his Academy Award-winning “The English Patient” was no fluke. Nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, including best dramatic film, “Ripley” is terrific, mounting along with Gabriel Yared’s stirring score to reveal one of the year’s most satisfying and complex webs of deception.

To mention too much of the plot is to reveal its secrets, so it won’t be fully explored here. What can be said is this: Ripley is given $1,000 by a rich shipping magnate to travel to Italy to persuade the man’s playboy son, Dickie (Jude Law), to return home and run the family business.

Tom accepts, travels to the Italian Riviera, devises a clever plan to meet Dickie and his fiancee, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) — and falls in love. Not with Marge, but with Dickie.

Homosexual undertones ran through Highsmith’s novel, just as they did in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” a film based on a Highsmith novel. But here, as a possible sign of the times, they are pulled to the forefront and given more weight.

Since Tom is the film’s villain, the focus on his homosexuality might offend some, but those sensitive to the many undercurrents that form Tom’s character will see that his homosexuality is just one of several shadings and not any kind of main motivational factor for all that occurs.

With Cate Blanchette perfectly cast as the social butterfly who may or may not destroy Tom’s plan, Jude Law in a breakout performance as a spoiled rich boy who collects people, Gwyneth Paltrow once again strong as a woman wronged, and Matt Damon fully recovered from his terrible turn in Kevin Smith’s “Dogma,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is a richly realized, cinematic feast of twists and turns and psychological depth.

It’s one of the year’s best films.

Grade: A

On Video

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN

The innocence of incompetence is on full display in Mic Rodgers’ highly unanticipated “Universal Soldier: The Return,” a movie that features Jean-Claude Van Damme and his magical, self-laundering shirt, a tight-fitting number that has the remarkable ability to appear badly soiled in one scene — and surprisingly spotless in the next.

The film, which follows 1992’s “Universal Soldier,” is filled with just this sort of inconsistency, which is no great wonder since it is the directorial debut of Rodgers, a former stuntman who may have been blown out of one too many cannons.

It is a fault of the genre that the glory and splendor of the special effects seem to forever supersede characters, situations and dialogue.

Action films of this sort — those whose thinly realized souls belong to science fiction — are for audiences not interested in people. They want pyrotechnics, gunfights, the occasionally blown-off head. If done well, such as in the “Terminator” movies, the ride can be fun. But when done badly, such as in “Return,” the entire production is reduced to camp, a pop-culture emptiness that asks its characters (and its audiences) to respond to this sort of dialogue: “I don’t care if he’s dead! Next time he grabs me, I’ll kill him!” Or, more profound, “Visible light we can see!”

It seems beside the point to discuss the plot and characters in “Return”; since they’re just shells for the weakly choreographed action, they hardly matter.

But what will matter to some is that Bill Goldberg, the popular wrestler with the popular growl, has been brought on board to play a villain named Romeo Unit. Since Romeo is never amorous, his name remains something of a mystery, but that’s part of Goldberg’s appeal, I suppose, his broad-chested mystery.

Too bad the film’s advertising people don’t see it that way. On the film’s unintentionally hilarious Web site (www.universalsoldier.com), Goldberg is described as “a giant six-foot-plus Energizer Bunny who takes a licking but keeps on ticking … He’s the Energizer Bunny on steroids!”

As flattering as that sounds, it’s Goldberg himself who offers real insight into himself and his character: “I love it, I get to be me,” he says on the Web site. “No acting lessons for this role. If I would have written the script, I don’t think I would have altered it a bit for my character, except for the fact that I probably would’ve killed a couple more people.”

Brilliant.

Grade: F

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”