 Sleep Easy, Hutch Rimes (2000) Hutch, played by C-level celebrity Steven Weber, is an insurance salesman with a tendency to hire and immediately sleep with married blond secretaries. At the beginning of the movie, Hutch is banging one particular secretary who has an abusive redneck for a husband. After he hits her one too many times, she tries to enlist Hutch in a scheme to kill him, revolving around Hutch pretending to be a prowler, luring the husband out to look for him, while the wife "accidentally" shoots the husband, thinking he's the prowler. Hutch, under threat of the relationship ending, or more probably because the script tells him to, buys into her idiotic plan. The wife, predictably, ends up dead, shot by the husband, who ends up, predictably, in jail. Flash forward ten years, and Hutch is banging yet another married, blond secretary with a jealous husband. She also decides she wants her husband dead – you know, cause he's jealous – and blackmails Hutch with threats of a sexual harassment suit. Oh, and the husband from ten years ago who was in prison for killing his wife – you know, the one Hutch was screwing? – he's out of jail, and he wants something from Hutch. No, not revenge, just money. Something about what his wife "had coming" when she died. And that guy's son? He's grown up now, and hates his father for killing his mother. But his girlfriend thinks that he should give his dad a chance because he really seems to want to make up for lost time, but he still hates him. But then the son finds some old love letters his mom wrote to Hutch, so now he hates his mother and Hutch, and he loves his father again.
So Hutch gets all scared and goes to his head secretary ,who is old and spinstery, and he tells her how much trouble he's in, and she explains how she has loved him since the day he hired her and she'll make it all better, so she goes and kills the other secretary and frames the jealous husband, but meanwhile the son has shown his dad the letters, so now they're mad at Hutch so they kidnap him and take him out to an abandoned farm to kill him, but then the old secretary shows up and kills them both to make it look like a murder suicide, and it turns out that she was also there that night ten years ago when the original secretary got shot, and she ends up doing it with Hutch in the same hotel where he took all the other secretaries, and he ends up making her a partner in his business. Was that enough information crammed in one endless run-on? Good, 'cause that's what watching the movie was like. They had enough supposed plot twists to fill two or three badfilms, and they crammed them all into 80 minutes. There was just way too much going on for it to make any sense, the fact that it was all totally unbelievable made it all the more tedious. It played like something a high school freshman would write after seeing Pulp Fiction for the first time. The difference between that haves and the have-nots of the cable world is getting greater all the time. HBO gives us "Band Of Brothers," "The Sopranos," and "Oz"; Showtime gives us Hutch Rimes. You go, Showtime!!
Review by Mario Speedwagon |
