Bad Influence - 1990 film review

Curtis Hanson was a highly capable movie director and I belatedly caught up with a film of his from 1990, Bad Influence. Thirty-five years on, it is still a good watch, and one of its incidental pleasures is seeing David Duchovny in a small part before his career took off with The X-Files. The lead actors, Rob Lowe and James Spader, are very good in their respective roles, and the script by David Koepp is strong. Koepp takes a familiar premise and shakes it up very effectively; he has, in the intervening years, developed into a top-class screenwriter and Bad Influence is clearly the work of a young and high-calibre writer.

Spader plays Michael, a highly-paid young man who is expert in high finance. He is engaged to a pretty and rich (if irritating) young woman but there seems to be a void in his life. It doesn't help that his older brother is a clueless guy with a drugs conviction who keeps borrowing money from him. Into Michael's life comes Lowe, playing Alex, a handsome and charismatic guy who introduces him to a life of hedonism.

At first Michael is excited to join in Alex's fun, but it's foreseeable that Bad Things Will Happen, and sure enough they do. What I liked about Koepp's screenplay was what happened as Michael's life begins to unravel. So often a film of this sort begins well and then deteriorates. That's not the case here. I wondered how some of the moral dilemmas Koepp had set up would play out, and I think the way he handled this was first-rate. My one reservation is that I'd have liked a deeper psychological understanding of Alex's character. The final scene in the film, although low-key, struck me as highly effective.

Reviews have often compared this movie to Strangers of a Train, and there's no doubt that the idea of a strong man exerting his will on a weaker associate has enduring appeal. For me, one of the finest examples of this kind of story is a book I've written about more than once - Hugh Walpole's The Killer and the Slain. Bad Influence is a very different story, but it also makes for good, and occasionally though-provoking entertainment.