Sea of Love

I tell you, by the time this was over I was pretty sick of hearing that song. The plot is that some crazed killer is shooting naked guys in their beds, and he leaves a “Sea of Love” platter spinning on the Victrola. Al Pacino is an alcoholic cop, and quite an asshole. He’s one of those guys who drives his wife to divorce, and then won’t let her go, tormenting her and her new husband with drunken phone calls late at night. He and his partner, John Goodman, get the cases, and have reason to believe that the killer is a woman who picks her victims by answering personal ads. So they set a trap for her, working their way through dozens of possibilities. One of them is Ellen Barkin, and Pacino foolishly gets in a relationship with her. Foolish not because I believed for a second that she was the killer, but because it’s unprofessional to have sex with a suspect. Barkin had a bad first marriage and it looks like she’s picking badly again, as Pacino would make a terrible husband, even if he got on the wagon.

It gets tense, though, as we get more and more indications that she might be the one, and Pacino gets more and more terrified every time he sleeps with her.

I was a little annoyed at myself for not guessing who the killer was. In retrospect there was only one person it could have been, if the writer was playing fair with us. And he was. That’s all I’ll say. I won’t even confirm or deny that it wasn’t Barkin, though I was very sure it wasn’t. Figure it out for yourself. It’s a decent suspense thriller, a bit in the Hitchcock vein.