"I feel like a f______g teenager"

Frank is a police officer. His wife has walked on him, but he can't get over it. He calls her three in the morning, "Hey, I think I got appendicitis." She hangs up. End of story.

How about an Al Pacino movie for a lazy Friday summer evening? Like all Al Pacino movies I have watched to date, this too has plenty of sub-text, only this one has a casual flair to it that most others don't even as we witness one murder after another after another, while this Manhattan detective goes around sniffing.

Frank ends up with a woman alright. But before that plenty happens.

Is this a formula film? Maybe. But it is plenty entertainment. After all, if you watch movies to get the latest insights in criminology, that's probably your problem, not Director Harold Becker's.

"I feel like a f______g teenager!" You can tell he is with a woman. He even looks several inches younger by the time the movie is over. Viagra, anyone?

If you can get the chemistry Pacino portrays, both with the woman - played by Ellen Barkin - and his buddy cop, you could miss the ending and still have walked away with some, which is what happens if you read the review and don't go for the movie ever, unless you have already watched it: this time I am not revealing too many details, especially to do with how the movie climaxes - I don't think I can afford yet another NR from Zhouse.

My favorite scene in the movie: Frank is back home at the end of the day, drunk. He falls gently onto his bed minus the bedsheets, his feet on the floor, the body in a perpendicular direction to what it might have been had his head landed on the pillow. And he is gliding into sleep, not so gently, if the music is any cue. Just when the scene is building up, the tension oozing, there is a knock on the door. The music is gone. Frank is back on his feet out of his doldrums. The guy is single, you can tell.

He ends up in a fist fight with his colleague at work who is now married to his "wife, ex-wife" - "Can I talk to my wife? Yeah, ex-wife? ... Hey, listen, I think I got appendicitis" - at the end of a ceremony of sorts at the police station that looks too much like a frat party scene. The day after he apologizes, shakes hands. Remember the fight scene, brief as it is. No one gets hurt, not an inch of torn shirt, but remember the fight.

Frank's latest assignment: bog down a serial sex murderer on the loose. Two men are down, the third is down after Frank and his now buddy cop (John Goodman) manage to track down but who swears on his children he is not out putting ads in papers looking for women.

Have you ever tried putting a singles' ad in the paper and then the two of you call all who write back - apparently this is before there was e-mail, nowadays you could just e-mail around, chat, meet people at Epinions.com ... I mean, I dunnow - with a big daily calender on the table and you meet women one every 30 minutes, taking fingerprints off of wine glasses. You send at least one to tears with Al Pacino throwing his big-eye looks, as in, "Sorry, but I was just doing my job."

Pacino and Barkin get involved. There is at least one steamy scene, well done too. And you are left hanging in mid air. This is one woman whose fingerprints they don't have. But Pacino is moving in deeper and deeper. He is not on the job any more, or is he? "Well, I always wanted to be a printer." He of course does not tell her in the beginning that he is a cop. The fella almost picks up a fight at a store with someone half his age.

The victims get killed while the killer leave the song "Sea of Love" playing. Why does she do that? At least she ends up giving the movie its name, and that is all I am telling you. Zhouse?

If you end up liking this movie, also try Fatal Attraction, The Color of Night, and Basic Instinct.

(To the Samuel Jackson fans out there, you spot him in the movie alright but barely so. This is 1989.)

"He plays a veteran NYC police detective who is a workaholic living on the edge."

Giggles14227 (Sun Jan 23 '00)

"Al is one of the guys who can play both cops and robbers, and he did a creditable job, but John Goodman's performance as Al's partner is the real gem in this production! He provides some badly needed comic relief to the somewhat sombre performance of the lead."

George_Chabot (Tue Feb 15 '00)

What I really liked about the movie besides the fact that it has three gruesome murders in it and it keeps you laughing along the way anyway, thanks primarily to Goodman - you know you are in for a ride - is that after the crime secret is revealed towards the end, the movie still drags on, and the tension is maintained to the very end.

I am almost tempted to reveal the crime secret. But I see Zhouse around, so I will spare you.