Random Hearts

Dutch (Ford) is a greying, aggressive Internal Affairs officer in the Washington, DC, force. Shocked to hear his wife has died in a Miami-bound plane crash; his own investigation reveals she was booked on the flight as one half of a fictitious married couple, with the now-dead husband of Congresswoman Kay Chandler (Scott Thomas). Contacting the woman, he tells her his life seems a lie; she, meanwhile, wishes to preserve a professional silence. Adapted from a Warren Adler novel, this might have been tailor-made by director Pollack to ease Ford into more straightforwardly romantic territory. In that sense, there must have been a failure of nerve, since the film involves the increasingly edgy Ford in an over-elaborate police corruption subplot angled to present the actor's undiminished physical powers as vividly as Dutchy's stubborn yet vulnerable character, and the chasm between his life and that of his lover-to-be. The director's evident intention to etch detail and emotional power into the conventional Hollywood template with strokes of East Coast psychological realism - seen best in the tense scene of the leads' first encounter, worst in the spontaneous eruption of passionate fumbling in an airport limousine - is inadequately realised, leaving the performers exposed but not revealed.