It’s girl detective weekend at the movies, isn’t it? The main thing that strikes me about this review from an August 1991 edition of The Reel Thing is the rapid way that certain film careers can crumble away, especially for actresses of, shall we say, a certain age. When we started doing the radio show in 1990, Kathleen Turner was a performer of great significance and acclaim. By the time we were done, three years later, her career was reeling from a series of commercial missteps. Her wonderfully wicked and wackadoo turn in John Water’s 2004 film, Serial Mom, was probably her last terrific screen work. Even that was viewed as a flop, and Turner was effectively relegated to scraps from then on (with, thankfully, a warmer embrace from the theater community to fall back into). As for the writing, let’s just say that double usage of a colon in one of the sentences toward the end caused me great pain to transcribe. In the spirit of the project, I left the grammatical ugliness intact.

Give a lot of credit to Kathleen Turner. If it weren’t for her impressive abilities as an actress, her latest film, V.I. WARSHAWSKI, would be a complete disaster. Turner plays the title character in this film based on the immensely popular series of Sara Paretsky detective novels, and it is her style, wit, strength, and charm that occasionally manage to elevate the film out of the dismal rut that it’s usually stuck in. Turner is a hard-boiled Chicago P.I. who’s got a thing for expensive shoes and guys with beards. In fact, it’s the beard fetish that hooks her up with a former Blackhawks hockey star and pulls her into the exceedingly dull mystery that is central to the film. It’s a completely uninteresting mystery, and all of the suspects and other participants are either so bland they’re instantly forgettable or so over-the-top that you shudder every time you see them reappear on the screen. At time, V.I. WARSHAWSKI seems like a detective thriller treated as if it were a t.v. sitcom: obvious an unfunny one-liners are interjected at awkward moments, and there’s even a kid delivering smart-mouthed jokes when the hockey player’s daughter tags along with Turner. Every character gets a punchline or two and a scene can’t end without a joke. Much better than any of the material she gets is Kathleen Turner. WARSHAWSKI is a role she’s been longing to play, and she jumps into it with impressive vigor. Even when she’s given nothing more than a tired cliche for a line, she delivers it in just the right way and makes it seem fresh and inventive. Turner and Hollywood Pictures were hoping that the WARSHAWSKI films would develop into an ongoing series, with a new installment every couple of years. Though the film’s box office death seems to insure that Paretsky’s character will be exclusive to the printed page for the near future, I’ve got a piece of advice for Hollywood Studios if they pursue a second feature: Change the writers, change the director, change everything but the star who fills the feature role: Kathleen Turner is the only person worth inviting back for V.I. WARSHAWSKI II.

1 and 1/2 stars.