1 out of 5

Have you had a conviction so strong that it was a shock to be disproven?

Case-in-point: “Color of Night” (or CON) was declared as having “The Hottest Movie Sex Scene of All-Time” in 2015 by men’s periodical Maxim. Sorry to break it to you: CON has one (1) sex scene in it – or sex ‘chunk’ – totalling less than five minutes of the well-over two-hour runtime of the Director’s Cut I watched.

By last decade’s standards, what is here for sex is hardly pervasive. Maxim’s writer asked, what man wouldn’t love being cooked a steak by a nude Jane March? True, but that’s “sexy”: not “sex”. And if we take sex out of the critique now completely, it still leaves quite a bit of movie behind to try and stand on its own merit.

CON plays comparably to your studio-made, 90’s-produced erotic thriller, with its own twists that will-or-won’t pay off for obsequious viewers. The script by Billy Ray (who later penned Bruce Willis’ 2002 film “Hart’s War”) is about the masks people wear & the moments we catch ourselves in our truth, and he uses group therapy as a story device to bring our oddball group of suspects together & point the finger.

But Willis’ protagonist also interrogates each group member individually, and these scenes grind like similar sequences from detective video games (think “L.A. Noire”), which is only fun for the people actually participating.

Truly, both of Ray’s scripts have the same problem. While Hart’s War lacked thematic focus – jumping incoherently between genres – CON lacks narrative focus: the group therapy scenes are enough to make me suspect each character without the “keyhole” into everyone’s life; the protagonist’s hook of psychosomatic colourblindness isn’t used assertively enough in the plot; and the ending is nihilistic, and problematic when viewed through a modern lens of gender inclusion.

Putting CON on a pedestal like Maxim did imposes certain audience presuppositions, possibly even that it’s some sort of sleazy, forgotten cult-classic. Certainly the cast is full of eclectic performers doing what they do best, the cinematography – heavy on split diopter shots – is intriguing, and late director Richard Rush’s familiarity with complex stories (like his “The Stunt Man” from 1980) meant that I was never unintentionally confused as a viewer.

But overall, Color of Night is too long and fails to fully capitalize on its best ideas.