It’s exciting to see a movie with mystery and suspense right from the beginning to end of end credits. Fight Club, Seven and Mulholland drive are few examples to mention. It is even more exciting when a favorite actor has acted in it even if it is a small role. Angel Heart is one such, a relatively unknown and underrated cult movie. The film has Mickey Rourke in the lead role and my favorite star Robert de Niro in special appearance, the reason why I took special interest to watch it (I am a die hard fan of de Niro!!).
Angel Heart is a perfect blend of mystery, horror and detective genre. The plot is set few years after the end of World War II, in the 1950s in which Harold ‘Harry’ Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a private detective from Brooklyn. He is hired by a wealthy but quite mysterious man Louis (de Niro) to find a singer named Johnny Favorite whether he is dead or alive. Throughout the course of his investigation, things get more and more bizarre when Harry unfolds something crucial and there is another knot waiting for him to tie around his neck, and get him into mess as if he is going to be transported to another world which has no return path.
Adapting the novel Fallen Angels, director Alan Parker has done a meticulous job of setting the extremely dark and scary environment full of secrets. It is a horror movie without any cheap scares. But the real scare elements are the visual and the music score. The visual presentation is distinctive and well matching to the film’s environment. The soundtrack scored by Trevor Jones is breathtaking, eerie and builds tension. The script is good with some really catchy dialogues. These aspects are well synchronized and leave the audience anticipating what may be an unusual and unexpected twisted ending.
The film has a powerful acting. Rourke takes the lead as a chain smoking, least bothered private detective, giving a tremendous acting showing us the horror through his eyes. Initially he is reluctant to accept the job, but eventually agrees when Louis is ready to a lucrative sum. The ‘special appearance’ by de Niro as Louis is much special that, with only 10 to 15 minutes of screen presence out of 112 minutes duration, de Niro had given a stunning acting.
This is one of his best in the line of Taxi Driver, The Godfather II, though not much popular among many. For those who have seen him as a gangster all these years in most of his movies, you people can see him in a completely different character, a role that he has done neither before nor after this film. When there is a slight lag in the screenplay, the gap is superbly filled by de Niro and Rourke’s sparkling acting. Rest of the cast also does their part quiet satisfactorily, mainly Lisa Bonet as the voodoo girl and Harry’s lover Epiphany, and Charlotte Rampling as Margaret, a fortune teller.
I wonder how movies like this are underrated despite having near perfection in almost every aspect. Those who like the above mentioned genre and the fans of de Niro who haven’t seen it yet, will surely enjoy this thrill ride. Please do watch fully till the end credits are over.