Lonely Hearts

Based on the real-life "Lonely Hearts Killers", Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez, who in the 1940s murdered up to 20 people they entrapped via the personal columns, this is an efficiently-made film with excellent period style although the combination of the sultry Salma Hayek who manages to travel the entire film looking like a raven-haired Catherine Deneuve, as the crazed Beck, and Jared Leto as the greasy and bald Fernandez make for an unconvincing pair of natural born killers.

Whilst the demented character of the criminals and their cold-blooded brutality will give, for those so disposed, some satisfaction, dramatically and performatively the film offers little, never getting beyond the details of the story itself. Writer-director Robinson, the grandson of the man responsible for the arrest of the killers, Elmer C. Robinson, played here by John Travolta, who seems to be wearing clothes too big throughout but who can never stop looking like John Travolta, divides his attention between the two halves of his story, the killers on the one hand and his good but troubled cop grandfather on the other. He does not, however, put this structure to good use, never moving away from stock characterisation and attempting, with little conviction, to tie the two strands together at a somatic level as the film draws to a close but finally ending with a visual homily that seems to suggest that we should forget everything that has gone before.

FYI: The story had previous been filmed as the 1970 cult classic, The Honeymoon Killers and was the inspiration for Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson, 1996.

 

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