‘Someone to Watch Over Me’: Ridley Scott’s most forgettable movie

Posted On February 2, 2025February 2, 2025

These days, Ridley Scott’s name is rarely out of the Hollywood headlines. Whether he’s making grand epics in his ninth decade, reminding everyone about how much he hates Pauline Kael, railing against the historians and millennials who criticise his films, or bragging about making four movies in the time it takes Martin Scorsese to make one, Scott is always full of bravado and bluster. However, it wasn’t always this way for everyone’s favourite octogenarian troublemaker.

After all, he’s gone through several sticky periods in his career, such as in the mid-1980s when he agreed to make a cookie-cutter romantic thriller because he needed a hit – and wound up making his most boring, forgettable movie.

In truth, Scott is no stranger to making bad movies. In the ’90s, he made three high-profile flops in a row that all received middling reviews – 1492: Conquest of Paradise, White Squall, and GI Jane – and in the 2010s, he has often seemed to alternate between greatness and disaster. However, even though I have beef with the likes of Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Hannibal, they could never be accused of being forgettable. These movies are all Scott swinging wildly for the fences, whether he’s delving into the goopy origins of the universe in an ill-advised Alien prequel, trying to bring back the Biblical epic, or making audiences watch Ray Liotta be served pieces of his own brain. Sure, they may have been a swing and a miss, but it will never slip my mind that I watched them.

Someone to Watch Over Me is a different kettle of fish, though. Scott signed up to make this “sexy” Tom Berenger/Mimi Rogers neo-noir after Legend flopped in 1985 because he realised he hadn’t made a genuine hit since Alien in 1979. He was on thin ice in Hollywood and agreed to take on a programmer he could hopefully infuse with his trademark visual style and skill with actors. Unfortunately for Scott, though, audiences didn’t seem interested in him making a movie like this, and it made a paltry $10million at the box office. Scott would have to wait until 1989 to get that elusive hit in the shape of the excellent Michael Douglas-led Yakuza action thriller Black Rain.

What exactly was so wrong with Someone to Watch Over Me, though? Well, in truth, nothing is abjectly bad about the film. Scott tells the story of a police detective protecting a beautiful witness in a murder trial from the nefarious forces that are trying to kill her reasonably well. The movie looks great, and Berenger displays some of the charisma he displayed in the previous year’s Platoon. It’s not particularly sexy, but then it could be argued that Scott wasn’t aiming for the same erotic thriller vibe that movies like Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, and Body Heat nailed. Instead, he was trying to tell the tale of a morally conflicted cop who ultimately decides to stay with his family after saving Rogers from the bad guys.

Ultimately, if that description sounds dull, the film itself is doubly so. In fact, when I was recently reviewing Scott’s filmography, it slipped my mind that I’d even seen the movie until I started reading about it again and my lizard brain went, “Oh yeah!” Scott is not a man who tends to make movies I forget I’ve seen, and that’s got to be the most damning thing I can say about it. If anything, it’s only worth engaging with Someone to Watch Over Me if you’re a Scott completist and want to see what it looks like when he tries to contort himself into a generic Hollywood form he’s ill-suited for.

In fact, as much as it may cause Scott to launch a volley of profane abuse, I think his arch-nemesis Kael may have been correct in her assessment of his most forgettable work. The legendary New Yorker critic argued that Scott had “put so much morbid, finicky care into this silly little story that he’s worried the fun out of it.”

She’s got you on that one, Ridley.

Related Topics