Utilizing a film-within-a-film format, the overall plot involves New York City-based director Eddie Israel directing actors Sarah Jennings and Frank Burns in a Hollywood marital-crisis drama, Mother of Mirrors, which is about a formerly wealthy but unemployed husband who berates his newly religious wife about what he considers her hypocritical aversion to their sex-and-drug lifestyle. During the shooting of that film, Israel becomes more and more demanding of his actors, growing increasingly obsessive with finding the ugly truths beneath the story's surface. All the while, his own carelessness and bad behavior with his own family begins to erode him and to corrode his marriage to Madlyn.
Cast
Harvey Keitel as Eddie Israel
Madonna as Sarah Jennings
James Russo as Francis "Frank" Burns
Nancy Ferrara as Madlyn Israel. The part was originally offered to Jane Campion.
Dangerous Game opened in US theaters on November 19, 1993. In 2007, Ferrara recalled, This was the first production by Madonna's Maverick Picture Company, a division of the newly formed entertainment companyMaverick. In Japan, the film was released under the name Body II as a sequel to Madonna's other 1993 filmBody of Evidence which had previously been released as Body. Neither film is directly connected to each other in narrative nor storyline. The video release of the film was banned in Ireland, most likely due to a violent rape scene. The cinema distributors never submitted it for an Irish theatrical release. The decision was appealed by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment – the viewing took place on 23 November, where the ban was upheld.
Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 31% of 16 reviews were positive, with an average rating of 4.09/10. Both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times praised Dangerous Game, with Janet Maslin of the former complimenting both Keitel and Madonna for their acting, and admiring the film's "raw, corrosive" quality: "Shot in a grainy, urgent style with occasional lapses into video, it has a fury that goes well beyond the story at hand, and an energy level that transcends the story's self-indulgence. This tough, abrasive film maker is seldom without his deadly serious side. 'Dangerous Game' is angry and painful, and the pain feels real." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times found it "compelling and explosive", saying, "t's a film of no-holds-barred language, passion and rage, but it's a move away from genre, more a chamber drama than action movie in which violence is more psychic than physical." He called Keitel "the ideal Ferrara star, his control, volcanic emotions and endless capacity for expressiveness and revelation matching up with those very qualities in Ferrara himself." Madonna, he said, "reveals the vulnerability as well as the strength of both the actress and the character she is playing." In a mixed review, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called Keitel "superb" and the film "a mesmerizing jigsaw", but found that "Madonna's take on an emotional crackup comes up snake eyes... and Ferrara's Dangerous Game stops being worth the playing." However, Owen Gleiberman, giving it a C- grade in Entertainment Weekly, called it "an ego-driven botch, one of those dawdlingly self-important, semi-improvised affairs about a director making a movie that turns out to be just like the one you're watching," but allowed that, "Madonna isn't embarrassing; she plays down the wax-goddess exhibitionism."
