Quite a few reviews have noticed the strong correlations between this movie and Body Heat, which is fair, but China Moon is a competent neo-noir on its own shapely merits.

Although the main male (Ed Harris) comes out looking like a sap, the femme fatale, played by the ever-enigmatic Madeleine Stowe, emits exactly the right tone as a woman trapped with no way out. Rachel’s fatal flaw, the same as Lizabeth Scott’s Jane in Too Late for Tears, is that she wants the money. All of it. At any cost. Full stop.

Already something up her (nonexistent) sleeve

Here’s the breakdown—super cop Kyle (Harris) is a big fish in a tiny pond; he’s the best detective small-town Florida has. The opening scenes show him as a professional, an honorable man, evicting smokers from crime scenes and making sure each detail is recorded correctly.

Baby Benicio del Toro (a reason to see the flick all in itself) plays Kyle’s rookie partner who wants to climb too far too fast and get the Hell out of Dodge. Then there’s the Munros, Rupert and Rachel (the doe-eyed Stowe), an unhappy rich couple soon to be split asunder.

Kyle bumps into the beautiful Rachel at a seedy Florida bar, and then tracks her down the next day on the street. They start something fiery and soon enough are dumping her husband’s body in the same lake in which they had skinny-dipped only a week prior.

As the murder plot slowly unravels, Kyle gets more and more desperate and Rachel snaps into focus as the one who’s been pulling his strings all along. The heavy acting chops are Harris’s as Kyle struggles with a powerful love versus his sense of honor. Many of the emotional leaps in this film are unbelievable, but we believe Kyle’s complete and total downfall. Something about him tells us that, once he’s smitten, even his honor won’t get in the way.

The final twist is twisty, sure, but anyone with their eyes open (especially in the first 90 seconds of the film) can figure out this who-framed-him easily. China Moon is reminiscent of other hot weather Florida thrillers, but Harris elevates the material, del Toro is stubbornly ambitious, and Stowe floats around the screen like a femme fatale cut-out doll. Even her cascading Veronica-Lake hair (in brunette) screams Noir Babe, so much so that it’s hard to see how anyone would’ve fallen for her innocent act.

Kyle may have met her drunk in a bar but, like the best femme fatales, Rachel remains the untouched fragile flower until the end, when she shows them all what real grit looks like. It’s only in the very last scene that we realize that this was Rachel’s story all along, and everyone else was just an accessory.

-MH