Review from The Philly City Paper
by Sam Adams
Walken at Work
Talking with Christopher Walken about Suicide Kings, a movie he steals sitting down...
It's not often that an actor gives one of his best performances while taped to a chair, but that's what happens to Christopher Walken in Suicide Kings. The veteran creep-out artist plays Charlie Barrett (formerly Carlo Bertolucci), a retired mob boss who is kidnapped by a group of moneyed youngsters in the hopes that he can be persuaded to help one of them retrieve his kidnapped sister (said method of persuasion involving, among other things, the severing of one of Barrett's fingers). While the movie doesn't always work as a whole, Walken's wickedly deadpan performance is a solid center for a movie that badly needs one.
What emerges most strongly from Suicide Kings is a sense of the class divisions between the former Mafioso and his wealthy abductors. As he slyly turns them against each other with a few well-placed words, Charlie tells his captors the one thing his hard life has taught him: "You can't trust each other, but you can trust the word on the street."
Speaking on the phone from his Manhattan apartment, Walken comes across as the old-fashioned kind of actor, one for whom acting is, first and foremost, a job. The baker's son from Queens shares with Charlie Barrett a working-class upbringing, and a brief glance at Walken's list of credits confirms the phrase he repeats several times during a brief conversation: "I like to work."
For Walken, Charlie Barrett is "kind of a good guy, a man of principle. He had a very spotty youth, but he was very intelligent, hard-working, and people respected him. He wasn't in the right business, but he made his money and got out." Despite his disreputable past, Charlie emerges as the movie's moral conscience, and even, says Walken, as a "father figure" for his captors.
With his air of ironic detachment and half-lidded cunning, Charlie Barrett is in some ways the über Walken role, the perfect distillation of a c.v. rife with shady characters and psychos. (In a less pronounced way, it's the equal of Jack Nicholson's performance in Batman, or Al Pacino's in The Devil's Advocate.) Does Walken ever get tired of being offered the same old roles? "I would like to do different things," he says, "and sometimes I do. But I like to work, and the fact that they want me for something is good."
Suicide Kings opens Friday, April 17, at Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz 12. See this week's movie shorts .
April 1998
