Good concept, poorly executed.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Blistering performances.

"The Deal" is an entertaining, but flawed political thriller.Christian Slater plays Tom, a man about to close a huge oil deal. But everything doesn't go as scheduled, because blackmail and murder go hand in hand on Wall Street. Christian Slater is very convincing in his role. Selma Blair looks bored. John Heard does nothing to advance the plot. Angie Harmon plays a Russian spy. Her accent is off the mark.The movie tries to be different because the climax involves not gunfire (well, there's some) but talking. It doesn't really work. But overall, it's worth seeing for Slater's performance.For more insanity, please check out: comeuppancereviews.com

There she is, Selma Blair! Dontcha just love her? She has what people who don't have it call 'class'. Maybe she was a preppie once. Well, she is good for a thinkie white collar role, as she looks like she has some brains and when she is looking like she is thinking she probably is, and that's pretty unusual with starlets. I guess she and Stockard Channing could make a good mother and daughter pair one of these days, a study of the Boston Brahmins perhaps. Now there's a subject for Harvey Kahn to get his eager little teeth into. And he really delivers as director here, with this extraordinarily complex and interesting thriller set slightly in the future. It is a meditation on corporate greed, oil smuggling, international tension, Arab states, house-of-cards companies which are about to collapse, rather like the real world at the moment. It is more relevant now than it was when it was made. Christian Slater is the male lead, and he has come a long way since 'The Name of the Rose' (1986) when he was a naive little novice monk with big innocent eyes. In fact, Slater is now a bit of a rough customer, or rough diamond, or whatever kind of rough you like. But rough, really rough. I don't see his attraction at all. He looks like he is always scheming on how to rob his grandmother of a nickel. Robert Loggia is wonderfully menacing and convincing as a big-time corporate manipulator who kills people when they interfere with his illicit profits. So watch out! He may do that at home! This is a most ingenious and intricate story, just like what really goes on in Wall Street, as we all now know. If you want to know why we have had to bail out all those investment banks, watch this.

I was afraid that it was going to be bad when the "maguffin" as Hitchcock called it was tacitly revealed as an oil company executive was having a conscience attack over something...and it was not a science fiction film! I couldn't say for sure if the problem was the lack of a real story or the misdirection of an outstanding cast, but this movie is slow, muddled and doesn't deliver at the end of the film. Christian Slater and Selm Blair are two of my favorites and it really is painful to watch them trying to give this doa project a bit of life. When I say that this is "Much Worse Than Awful", I mean it! Talent and budget can't go anywhere without a real story. Stay away from this one.

Christian Slater in "The Deal". Good lord in heaven: what did Slater do in a former life to deserve this movie? He has made a lot of really bad choices lately ("Mindhunters", "Masked and Anonymous", "Alone in The Dark") but this is the kind of script even Oliver Platt would walk away from. A laughably bad script from first (and hopefully last) time screen writer, Ruth Epstein, who should have kept her job at Goldman Sachs. The pathetic premise of an oil conspiracy is about as thin as an Olsen Twin, and the dialog is twice as brittle; made doubly so by Angie Harmon when she tries to pull off a Russian accent (which, if I've done my math right, means the dialog has the octo-brittleness of a single Olsen, but I digress). Slater tries to crawl his way through a flimsy maze of corporate deceit, while woman after woman can't help but chew his tongue. Slema Blair is actually very good as his tree-hugging girlfriend who shows him the path to salvation, only the scene where she actually show him anything must have been deleted, 'cause I never saw it. Maybe they're saving it for the DVD. There is simply nothing thrilling about this thriller. They must have just figured if the stacked the cast with actors like Robert Loggia and John Heard they could ad-lib their way around the awkward exposition. Director Harvey Kahn, who has produced an impressive body of work but directed nothing of note, must have compromising photos of the cast. Ultimately, Slater is totally miss-cast as a Wall Street hack. They should have gone with an unknown and then maybe they could have gotten away with the low budget production values and pass 'The Deal' off as a student film. You have been warned.