I certainly agree with all the critical reviews. Nevertheless, I rated the movie much higher than the average for two simple but essential reasons: it was quite entertaining and definitely not boring.I never liked Kevin Spacey and he did his best to justify my attitude toward him. On the other hand, Kevin Kline is one of my all time favorite actors despite his mediocre performance here.P.S. I saw the movie when it first came out but I remembered only one single scene from it when I watched it the second time on 01/25/2018.

This movie had been in my Netflix Queue for sometime and I decided to give it a watch after meeting Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio in person (very gracious lady). Anyway, I'd seen the film before, but it had been many years. After viewing it again this time around, I came to the same conclusion. The first half of the story is very engaging and interesting. Kevin Spacey is brilliant in one of his early roles. Mastrontonio and Kline are also very appealing. You like the characters and you care about them. However, the second half of the film, the "thriller" portion, is so lame and unrealistic that I completely lost interest. It's as if the writers simply gave up on how to finish this film off. They created very interesting characters, set up a nice story, but the story didn't have anyplace interesting to go. I'd love for someone to try a rewrite of this thing. Anyway, not much going on here with this film. The only relevance it has is if you are a Spacey, Kline, or Mastrontonio fan. Rating 5 of 10 stars and that is being somewhat kind.

This movie is both unlikely and unlikeable. It is unlikely that good actors would sign on to such a ridiculous and implausible screenplay. Perhaps neither Kline nor Spacey read the script before agreeing to do this film. That seems the most plausible explanation.At some point one would imagine that someone would have asked the director just why the audience should give a flying flip about the fate of the alleged protagonist. He is a man being framed for the murder of his neighbor, when he was only guilty of raping her. (I should also note that he had also arranged to have his own wife raped by the husband of his victim, but that man, the alleged antagonist, did not follow through. Instead he killed the woman Kline's character had assaulted and set out to frame him for it.) The women in this movie are as vapid as the men are vile. The framed character's wife ultimately forgives him when he is cleared of the murder without any regard for the fact that he had snuck over to their neighbor's house in the middle of the night to have sex with another woman without her consent. She also doesn't seem to mind that he had volunteered her for the same treatment.

The first part of the film really drags where a musical performer, Kevin Kline, leads an average life with wife and daughter. Along comes the new neighbors.Kevin Spacey is in fine form as the neighbor. At once, he shows himself to be an oddball. He becomes a little too friendly with Kline and Mary Elizabeth, and when they say they're not that rich, he fakes an accident so that they can get money. All this comes at a price, he wants to swap partners. I thought I was dealing with a picture about swinging but how wrong I was.The film really takes off when Spacey's wife is found dead and Kline, who had supposedly gone to bed with her, is the prime suspect in her murder.While the movie becomes a murder mystery, this exciting part could have been handled a lot better. It is soon determined that Spacey had a large insurance policy out on his wife, and more shockingly, the dead woman is not his wife, and furthermore, Spacey is now carrying on with Kline's wife. All this as you can imagine is a little too hard to take.The ending has that riveting feeling but you feel that you've gone way out of the way to get to this point.