Striptease (1996)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Erin Grant	Demi Moore	½
Lt. Al Garcia	Armand Assante
Shad	Ving Rhames	½
Darrell Grant	Robert Patrick
Congressman David Dilbeck	Burt Reynolds
Rita Grant	Siobhan Fallon Hogan
Angela Grant	Rumer Willis
The Bachelor	Marc Chaykin
Malcolm Moldowsky	Paul Guilfoyle
Alan Mordecai	Stuart Pankin

Review

Although Striptease is such a chaotic and mixed bag of moods and genres that it's doubtful whether writer/director Andrew Bergman really knew what he was doing, the end product is both fascinating and eventful – outshining many of the more assembly-line works with which it was (somewhat wrongly) compared at the time of release. Because while the critics back in the day slaughtered Striptease for being speculative or even exploitative in terms of nudity and eroticism, seen today those same scenes come off as colourful and evocative. This is not an erotic thriller by any stretch of the imagination; it's a drama with a host of hilarious comedic characters whom give the film a feeling of being not only totally out of control, but almost out of touch with reality. Granted, writer/director Andrew Bergman failed miserably in trying to balance Carl Hiaasen's wit with the more dramatically potent elements of the story during his adaptation, but while that makes the film partly silly and partly ineffective, it doesn't mean that the humour and richness is not retained or valuable in its own right. Robert Patrick and Burt Reynolds both give marvellous over-the-top performances that were greatly misunderstood back in 1996, and if the film doesn't quite live up to its dramatic potential, the scenes between real-life mother and daughter Demi Moore and Rumer Willis certainly do.