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| Sharon Stone tries to downplay her involvement in the1999 bomb Gloria by appearing as Jodie Foster on the poster. |
I remember my first reaction upon seeing trailers for the remake of Gloria in 1999 and hearing the few clips of its star Sharon Stone speaking in a Noo Yawk accent: Oh, no! Is she going to talk like that for the whole movie?
She does, but really, it’s not that bad, and neither is this Sidney Lumet-directed remake. That said, its falls well short of John Cassavetes’ 1980 original.
This time out Gloria isn’t a tough-as-nails broad but, as portrayed by Stone, a foul-mouthed, smartass floozie. Upon release from a Florida prison—one that generously provides hair and makeup services for its prisoners—she heads back to New York to break up with her gangster boyfriend Kevin (an underwhelming Jeremy Northam) and collect the money she was promised when she took the fall for him. To Gloria’s apparent surprise, her criminal boyfriend is less than accommodating. Worse, Kevin’s goons have kidnapped the 7-year-old son of the gang’s double-crossing (and recently murdered) accountant, and they have plans to make him join the rest of his slaughtered family. Not if Gloria can help it! She overtakes one of Kevin’s henchmen with a sharp knee to his nuts, grabs his gun and then forces the roomful of gangsters to empty their pockets and strip (“Unduh-weah too!”). She takes off with all their money, jewelry and the boy, Nicky (Jean-Luke Figueroa, who isn’t too irritating).
Gloria spends the rest of the movie clomping across NYC in four-inch heels, trying to protect Nicky while simultaneously looking for someone to take the kid off her hands. Along the way she dispenses such words of wisdom as: “You got a small pee-pee, men got big pee-pees. Well, some of ’em. And hopefully, one day you will too.” (Between Stone’s performance and Steve Antin’s script, I half suspect that this movie was originally intended to be a comedy.)
Though it received mostly negative reviews upon its release in January 1999, going on to earn just over $4 million against a $30 million budget, Gloria isn’t anywhere close to being the fiasco I’d anticipated. Stone has certainly done worse (take your pick). What’s surprising is that for all the name brand talent involved (in addition to Lumet and Stone, you get Cathy Moriarity, Bonnie Bedelia and George C. Scott in his final film role), Gloria feels like a B-movie, the type of thing in which Stone would’ve appeared pre-Basic Instinct, albeit as a supporting character. Stone even wears the same hairstyle from that period of her career. Maybe if the movie had been made as a belated rip-off of Gloria rather than a full-fledged remake (Sharon Stone is, uh ...Gina!) people could appreciate it as matinee trash with delusions of grandeur rather than dismissing it as failed Oscar® bait from a star trying to maintain her leading lady status into the next decade.
