[In the following excerpt, Simon offers a negative assessment of The Underneath.]

I have had scant use for Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape, and less for his Kafka and King of the Hill. Now comes a film that he had no writing hand in. So here is a chance to see what he can do when he can concentrate on his directing, which, in American film, is far more important than screenwriting. And I declare that in The Underneath, Mr. Soderbergh flunks the test with flying colors.

These flying colors are not just a metaphor. For the young director, with the help of his cameraman, Elliot Davis, immerses us in meaningless color baths that recur throughout. Sometimes everything is awash in greens, sometimes in blues or reds; most often there is no justifying colored-light source. And sometimes Soderbergh contrives a multicolored background as if, with conspicuous arbitrariness, the entire scene were shot in front of a cathedral window.

Equally exasperating are the extreme closeups. Thus someone will be talking in full-face or three-quarters in a very tight shot while, even more unbearably close, is the interlocutor, seen in quarter profile. The effect is visually obstreperous without dramatic necessity. Again, there are double exposures galore; indeed, the whole movie is a virtual double exposure with its dizzyingly alternating time frames: the past, in which the hero, Michael, is bearded; the present, in which he is clean-shaven. That is the only gauge: our orientedness hangs by some facial hair. And there are both flashbacks and flashforwards.

Joshua Donen and Daniel Fuchs's screenplay, a remake of the 1947 Criss Cross, is an unrelenting concatenation of double and triple crosses, the characters' dishonesty compounded by the cheating of the filmmakers. The plot is murky in the extreme, and figures such as Michael's mother and brother pop in and out as contrivances, not integral components. The hero's mistress, his ex-wife, and her gangster husband are all insufficiently explored, which might not matter if the plot were novel or made a modicum of sense, but no such luck.

Two young actresses, Alison Elliott and Elisabeth Shue, are fetching and effective, and some supporting parts are well taken. But the film has a major minus in its middle: the Michael of Peter Gallagher. A passable actor, Gallagher has a most unsettling face: that of a pretty boy with hypertrophic eyebrows and lush, lipstick-enhanced lips. His entire countenance seems to deliquesce into a splotch of spreading goo. In any number of ways, The Underneath is beneath contempt.