Michael Radford's leisurely paced Flawless digs itself into a
deep, cavernous hole in its opening scene and never manages to crawl out of it.
A sassy young female journalist meets an elderly woman who appears to be played
by Demi Moore, though she's buried under so many layers of unconvincing old-age
makeup that it's hard to confirm. The film then unfolds in flashback, as
Moore—or rather, a comically grotesque educated guess as to what she
might look like decades from now—tells her rapt young interviewer about
the long-ago heist at the center of the film.
The film then rides the Wayback
Machine to the giddy days of the early-'60s, where Moore's plucky striver
serves as the sole woman among a boys' club of executives at the London Diamond
Corporation. Year after year, Moore watches less-qualified and better-connected
men climb over her on the corporate ladder. When her bosses co-opt one of her
brilliant ideas so they can fire her and claim credit for themselves, Moore
hooks up with enigmatic janitor Michael Caine, who has an ingenious scheme to
make off with millions in diamonds.
Flawless quickly, bluntly establishes Moore
and Caine as consummate outsiders united by a common enemy and a shared set of
grudges. Problem is, they never emerge as anything more than the sum of their
class grievances. Part of this is intentional: Moore is so consumed with
staying afloat in a poisonously sexist, cutthroat corporate environment that
she doesn't have time for anything resembling a personal life; all work and no
play makes her a dull girl as well as a boring protagonist. Moore hasn't
tackled a lead role since the turn of the century, and judging by her eminently
forgettable work here, she hasn't spent that time painstakingly honing her
chops. This is made achingly apparent by the return of Moore's distractingly
awful geriatric makeup in a hokey fairytale ending so ridiculously sugary that
diabetics will want to flee theaters 10 minutes early just to be on the safe
side.