'Fair Game' and a requiem for the cheesy '90s thriller genre

Last night, inspired by a particularly hilarious How Did This Get Made? podcast I finally watched the 1995 debacle Fair Game. The movie, which was a big budget attempt to turn Cindy Crawford into the next Julia Roberts, and establish William Baldwin as the next Keanu, is incredibly bad but also wildly entertaining -- and it made me a little nostalgic for '90s cheese.

I'm talking about the plethora of subpar, nominally erotic thrillers which seemed to be in an endless supply following the breakout success of the legitimately good Basic Instinct in 1992. Movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Sleeping with the Enemy, Single White Female, Jade, Body of Evidence, Sliver, The Specialist and yes, Fair Game.

These movies almost all had abrupt and arguable unnecessary nudity, ridiculous one liners, a jarring amount of senseless violence and plots so labyrinthine and convoluted that it's almost as if the filmmakers deliberately want audiences to have no idea what is happening on screen -- or what, if anything, the title means.

Fair Game is like the Mona Lisa of this type of movies. It has no cliche that goes unexploited -- from the slow motion dive away from an explosion, to the impractical sex scene amid a chase -- and yet, like so many other films in the genre it has a sort of audacious hubris that I admire.

The makers of this movie (including 90's-action super-producer Joel Silver) have no patience for subtlety. They figured we have two hot stars here let's get them wet as often as possible (literally and figuratively) and keep them and the movie moving even if coherence gets sacrificed in the process.

We almost never get straight ahead thrillers anymore -- we barely still get traditional action. And when we do they are pretty tame and innocuous. I sort of miss the days when the pre-release hype about a movie was about how graphic the sex scene was, or whether or not the stars had kinetic chemistry. Now, it's just -- what did it do on its opening weekend.

Of course, Fair Game was a miserable failure financially too. It short-circuited William Baldwin's career pretty much for good, and Crawford, as stunning as she is here, wisely realized that acting isn't her forte. There's one scene in particular, where she is tasked with seducing a stereotypical nerd which suggests that she has never acted flirtatious in her entire life.

But now, this movie can be enjoyed in a totally different context. It requires active participation. When a movie depicts a character being shot in the penis and then the neck, after which their toupee gets ripped off (and yes, that happens in this movie) you can't not have an audible reaction.

Nothing in Jurassic World provoked that kind of reaction from me. Virtually nothing happened in that movie that I didn't anticipate. Sure, Fair Game doesn't make a lot of sense -- I never understood the plot -- but at least it has a certain relentless enthusiasm.

Ahh the nineties. It was just a kinder, simpler time.