Synopsis
There are no rules when the game is murder...
A football player is framed for the murder of his team's owner, whose wife he happens to be sleeping with.
Midnight Heat
1996 Directed by Harvey Frost
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USA
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USA
01 Jul 1996
- Theatrical
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I had some free time lately and started reading up on the CFL and all of the quirks of Canadian Rules Football: different field dimensions, three downs instead of four, and you can score a single point called a "rouge" with an unreturned kick into the defending team's end zone (also the ball weights about 5 pounds and comes with a retractable javelin that can be used as a weapon... Canada is a strange place). I've always thought of the CFL as a place where washed-up NFL players end up, but supposedly the different rules make it a faster version of the game.
But it struck me odd that there seems to be almost zero depictions of the Canadian game…
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Part of the Movies on Cinemax in May 1996 project.
“They’re gonna love you in the can. There’s never enough assholes.”
The world's oldest pro football player Tim Matheson returns from a stint in rehab to discover he's no longer welcome on the team. So he punches the owner and then has sex with the owner's wife. From there he finds himself the main suspect in TWO murders, including the owner (shocker).
The problem with a movie like this one is that it presents maybe three main characters and you know one of them is innocent and it makes a point to show you exactly how the other two probably know each other. So, once you realize quite early who…
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The oldest NFL-player in the known universe starts a humpy-bunny-rabbit-affair with the wife of the soon to be deadest NFL-boss in the known universe. Meanwhile a lot of quasi-mysterious synth music and supposed-to-be-sensual trumpet music is playing in the background. It’s all very generic, but nevertheless I’m very excited, because - apparently - there’s still a chance that I might become an NFL-player in a few decades or so.
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DIRECTOR: "I'm supposed to deliver a 92 minute film but this script is only 70 pages long. What do we do?"
WRITER: "I could put in some big action sequences?"
DIRECTOR: "Nah, it's not that sort of film. I'm making it in the style of a classic hard boiled noir that happens to be set in the mid 1990s, even though it looks like it's set in the mid-late 80s. Anyone else have any ideas?"
PRODUCER: "...........pass me the phone.........hi Tim Matheson? Hi it's your Midnight Heat producer. Listen - how do you feel about doing an unusually high number of uncomfortably long sex scenes?" -
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A 90s neo-noir that always teeters on the edge of hilariously overwrought and tediously overwrought, until the ending puts it over the edge into solidly enjoyable for me.
An almost-50-year-old Tom Matheson plays a pro football player, and I was genuinely confused by this. Up until he says he got them to the Super Bowl I thought he might be a businessman and maybe all the football was just like a team building exercise or something?
The entire movie I kept thinking that you could make this a comedy by rewriting Matheson's part for like Jason Bateman or 80s Chevy Chase and you wouldn't have to change the rest of the script pretty much at all.
Featuring a very young Tom Cavanagh in a bit part as a beat cop who definitely knows he's in a shitty Cinemax movie.
