Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  6 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: 'Someone to Watch Over Me,' is about a married cop called Mike (Tom Berenger) who's assigned to protect a Manhattan socialite (Mimi Rogers) and starts to fall in love with her. It's all delivered very well; their chemistry is tenderly developed, the crime element of the story is reasonably delivered and the few tense scenes are edited well, and the whole thing is filmed evocatively by Ridley Scott and scored atmospherically by Michael Kamen and various other artists.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Ultimately though, it's a film with its heart in entirely the wrong place. We're supposed to empathise and engage with the central relationship, but the truth of the matter is that both Tom and Claire are prize douchebags who ignore the feelings of their true partners, and that's made all the more apparent when we see so much of Tom's wife and kids. He deserves all the jazz-soaked sorrow that comes his way, and when the chips are down at the end and he gets his happy ending, it just feels unbelievably unearned.
  
  VERDICT: A film about an affair that sympathises far too much with the perpetrators, 'Someone to Watch Over Me,' is a reasonably delivered, but extremely misjudged, romance movie.

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