The new thriller “Flawless” is a dud, but I had a good laugh during the opening scene when the character played by leading lady Demi Moore meets with a contemporary journalist to tell the story behind a 1960 London jewel robbery.
The Moore character was a young American businesswoman at the time of the heist, so I guess we are to assume she is now somwhere in her 70s.
But the actress is buried under piles of ghastly make-up that give her the appearance of a recently exhumed mummy.
It’s the worst aging make-up job since Bette Midler in the old lady scenes that bracketed her 1991 flop “For the Boys.”
Aging is of paramount importance to movie stars, since Hollywood tends to lose interest in performers around the time they hit 40, but middle-aged actresses often go to wild extremes when they are called upon to trick themselves up as senior citizens.
Does Moore look the way she does in the opening of “Flawless” because the actress thinks that’s the way an “ordinary woman” looks in her 70s? Or, was the Mrs. Bates mask foisted on her by director Michael Radford?
For whatever reason, this gruesome opening scene gambit makes “Flawless” seem ludicrous right from the start.
“For the Boys” never really recovered from Midler’s old lady intro (“I thought she was supposed to be a burn victim!,” a startled friend told me after a screening) and that expensive flop more or less finished off the actress-singer’s movie career.
(By the way, I haven’t a clue as to the identity of the actress pictured above. I couldn’t locate a shot of Moore or Midler in their dotage scenes, but I did find this old dear floating in cyberspace.)
