SIMPATICO

Don't bother spending your hard-earned cash on this one. A quite interesting cast struggles with a not-so-interesting plot involving rigged horse races and blackmailing.

Nick Nolte (looking laughably disheveled) and Jeff Bridges play old friends who have a dark past of a horse-racing scam that they've tried to leave behind them. Bridges is a very successful horse breeder in Kentucky, and Nolte is down-and-out in Beverly Hills... I mean, somewhere in California. Nolte's character has always been supported by Bridges, in order to keep his mouth shut about their past (involving blackmailing a racing commissioner some 20 years earlier). Sharon Stone is in the film for, oh, about 5 minutes towards the end of the film, as the third of the three friends involved in the scam.

There are constant flashbacks, with younger actors playing the three. These flashbacks were annoying, and bring to mind one of my pet peeves:  having actors who look nothing like each other playing the same character at different ages. I spent half the time wondering which of the young men was supposed to be Nolte, and which was Bridges. Finally I gave up, and figured if he was disheveled looking, I guessed he was supposed to be Nolte.

Two redeeming parts of the film: Albert Finney and Catherine Keener. Albert Finney plays the blackmailed commissioner both in the past and present scenes, and he's a hoot (though in the present scenes, he was looking an awful lot like William Shatner, permed gray hair and all). Then there is the always delightful Catherine Keener, who plays Nolte's kind-of-girlfriend (in the present). She is a dim but trusting woman who works at Payless, and cluelessly gets thrown into all the mess as the secrets are unfurled. She and Finney have a great chemistry, and their scenes together almost seem like they are from a different movie. The two of them are the only reason to see this otherwise uninteresting, waste-of-a-lot-of-talent film.