This movie once again proves that Jane Fonda is simply the best actress alive today. She will always be remembered in the same way Bette Davis or Katherine Hepburn is remembered. Her performance here is stunning, and there is no doubt that she is the best thing about this film. I don't think Jane Fonda is capable of giving a bad performance, although her choices of film roles is sometimes questionable. Fonda plays a down-at-the-heels actress who used-to-almost-be a star, but wound up playing to a bottle of Thunderbird. Now a hopeless boozer, one step away from homelessness, she blacks out and wakes up in bed next to a stiff with serious heart-trouble: A butcher knife in his chest. Enough to give anyone the DTs... Jeff Bridges is a disabled marginally-functional ex-cop who takes in stray lushes; the perfect foil for Fonda's neurotically manic but sympathetic character.The suspense is fairly well placed, if at times heavy-handed, the plot thickening when a sympathetic former cop, Turner Kendall (Jeff Bridges) comes onto the scene who may or may not be trustworthy. Fonda's scene with Bridges over an impromptu dinner is simply superb where she says, "I used to be an actress," her biting sarcasm mixed with self-pitying pathos and bile. The interior sets are perfectly designed and decorated. An apartment all in Mauve with matching furniture and a glowing turquoise pool beyond a balcony. Buildings in Yellow and Red. Everything designed to draw you in. There are times when the dialogue seems a bit cheesy and dated but it is so much fun watching Jane here I don't care. I dig this out once a year to watch and I think most Fonda fans will love it.Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

Would you ever think that Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges had chemistry on screen? Well if you want to see it then you won't really find it here. What you will find is good performances from the two, but with a fairly weak script and a story that mildly entertains. The Morning After is the story about a washed up actress who wakes up with a hangover next to a dead man one morning. She has no recollection of the previous night and no idea what to do with herself in this situation. She finds help from a mysterious young man named Turner Kendall, played by Jeff Bridges, but suspense and mystery build as her situation becomes increasingly dire. She doesn't know if this strange Turner character is a blessing or a curse and whether she should trust him, or be deathly afraid of him. And so the mystery begins in this halfway decent suspense thriller of which there's not a whole lot to say.The Morning After is helped by strong performances and an engaging story that leads you on to want to know the outcome. It is hurt by a weak script and the lack of originality it faces in its midsection. It starts out strong, opening with Jane Fonda's character waking up in bed next to a man with a knife in his chest. She panics and leaves the apartment she is in and tries to get her situation under control before she decides what to do with the body. During this panic she meets Turner, and this is where the mystery begins.The film builds its suspense nicely, but after a while it starts to flat line and doesn't get any more interesting until the end. A romance begins between Fonda and Bridges, not unexpectedly to say the least, and for a while nothing much happens. The two characters are developed and their relationship grows, but after a while it becomes redundant and their back stories don't end up being all that creative. Fonda is an actress who used to be big and has now fallen into obscurity. Bridges was a big shot cop who suffered an injury and is now a nobody. These character profiles are important to the overall arc of the story, but they don't make our two main characters all too interesting, leading the film as a whole to not be all too interesting. Plus, we have a script that leaves a lot to be desired. But when the film finally comes to its conclusion it isn't something I saw coming, but in retrospect I probably should have been able to see it from a mile away. I can, however, give the movie credit for having a very exciting climax, but that leads into a final scene which wraps the film up a little too nicely.When you get right down to it, The Morning After is just sort of there. It isn't great, it isn't terrible, but it isn't something I will remember. I won't be thinking about this film in a few weeks and I might not even remember watching it. It's a movie that tells a mildly interesting story with mildly interesting characters played by great actors. It's more or less your typical suspense thriller, and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's really nothing here that is going to stick with me.

The Morning After opens with an extraordinarily effective scene prototypical of director Sidney Lumet's pared-down building of tension. As Jane Fonda crawls out of bed, we sense her hangover, one of those inordinately miserable mornings when nothing about you is sufficiently functional, and we also sense how accustomed she's become to these mornings as she is not only passably functional but also recognizes herself in the mirror and indeed spills some gin into a glass, speculating about the guy in her bed. Who is he? She doesn't comprehend the true gravity of her predicament until she turns him onto his back. She sees no cop is going to buy her story, so she attempts to remove all the evidence of her stopover. And then she rambles back out, into the intense Los Angeles light. And in a shot from high overhead, she seems like a lab rat, ensnared in some sort of a experiment. It's so well directed that we almost forget how preposterous it is to think this frame-up would ever work. This beginning promises an exceptional thriller. Alas, The Morning After never matches its initial potential, not as a thriller, at least. The narrative has some gaping disparities in it, and thrillers need to be impermeable. This one chalks various elements up to pure coincidence, the ultimate motives are flimsy at best and the fact that the body keeps reappearing like a cartoon or a take-off on The Trouble with Harry brings the movie too close to qualifying as '80s schlock for one to become seriously absorbed in the plot. But The Morning After merits a look anyhow, owing to the characters that it cultivates, and the performances of Fonda and Jeff Bridges in the two leads. She plays an alcoholic actress long past her heyday. He plays an ex-cop who happens to be fixing his car right where she topples into his back seat and implores him to get her away from there, quick. Bridges stays in a petty, manufactured shed, where he repairs appliances. This is all Fonda needs. She's a veteran of the live-fast-die-young subscription, her friends all bartenders and drag queens, her separated husband Raul Julia the most upmarket hairdresser in Beverly Hills. Nevertheless Bridges is reliable and sound, and she could do with a friend. Naturally it's axiomatic that they fall in love. The plot of The Morning After is not nearly as well captured or interesting as the day-by-day grinds of these characters. Actually, I can picture a movie that would omit the murder and just trail the genuine human development between Fonda and Bridges. The thriller filler isn't needed, although given that they used it, couldn't they have made it credible? The entire murder plot gets such slapdash treatment that perhaps I oughtn't have been startled by the big scene in which the killer's exposed. I've seen innumerable revelations in innumerable thrillers, but seldom one as transparent as this one, where the surprises are just announced in an improbable monologue. Indeed, the fact that nearly every opinion I've heard or read of this film seems unanimous in terms of James Hicks' script, including mine, even down to the 'It starts off well but then it gets really forced and jerry-built' gist, it seems pretty clear-cut what makes the film not quite work, though it'd be a misstep to write this movie off simply because the story is so rickety. It's worth making an allowance for due to the performances. Fonda and Bridges are superb in the film, and their rapport, founded on skeletons in the cupboard, bitterness and ulterior motives, gets especially remarkable. They create tangible unspoken feelings together, and they have some dialogue that feels more alive than most starry-eyed chatter in the movies. Before the schmaltzy final scene, not even close to prototypical of Lumet, there's a single shot in which all Bridges and Fonda do is face each other, and we know, and fee, that they want to have sex with each other. It's just energy, and it works wonders. I also admire how Lumet reinforces every color. Living in Los Angeles is part of the debilitating influence on the character played by Jane Fonda. All color is exaggerated: red redder, blue filters, orange hazes. He creates an L.A. comprised of vast flat surfaces of pastels and aggressively sunlit exposed areas. He traps the inebriated Fonda on this landscape like a helplessly insignificant insect sought for squashing by unknown feet, and the imagery makes the whole first hour of the movie much more ominous than it merits. Too bad they couldn't have take steps with the script.

The film takes place in LA in the 1980's. So you know what that means- I don't even need to say do I? Any film from the 80's has a very distinct look and while you see glimpses here and there of that era it's not too much to be distracting even if some screen time takes place in a beauty salon. The film is interesting to watch because of the actors. They all do a good job here. Jane especially. Jeff Bridges and Raul Julia also are very good here. So it is the acting, the performances that make the film. The sets too are great-they almost are a character themselves from Alex's Pink and Mauve art deco place to the low budget but homey place of Turner's garage pad.The flaws. There are some. Some of the dialog is cheesy and clichéd with laughable lines. The references to different cultures here in crude and crass terms. This was way BEFORE "politically correct".This is not the greatest movie but I still love it and drag it out to watch about once a year.