Fit as she obviously, obsessively, vainly is, Demi Moore is not a fit mother. That is, she's a poor fit in the written part: a topless dancer who is first and foremost an average, everyday, devoted, loving mother only temporarily employed as a topless dancer in order to raise the crucial $15,000 to continue her child-custody fight against a slimeball "ex" whose sliminess had caused her in the first place to lose her secretarial job with the FBI but who nevertheless has the civil-court judge in his hip pocket ("He was the finest high-school tailback I ever saw"). Now, granted, Moore is herself a real-life mother (the intense-looking child in the movie is her very own, Rumer Willis), but she is not by any stretch your average, everyday one. Average, everyday ones, at least those at the barely-scraping-by level of the economic staircase, are not able to put in the mandatory four and five hours a day in the workout gym to maintain maximum buffness. And if they're barely scraping by, they are not apt to splurge on extensive cosmetic surgical enhancements either. There's no point, for all that, in carrying on as if the presence of Moore in the lead role had sabotaged a potential classic. Adapted from one of Carl Hiaasen's over-the-top and wide-of-the-mark burlesque suspense novels, and directed by the habitually disappointing Andrew Bergman, Striptease is a ham-fisted comedy which, even were it as nimble-fingered as Glenn Gould, would have been wrecked anyway by the mawkish mother-daughter stuff ("Not having her around -- it's like my heart is missing"). No explanation is advanced for Mom's unfortunate choice of mate -- and needless to add, no blame, no self-recrimination, no soul-searching. Nothing, in sum, to take away from the purity of her martyrdom. And nothing, at the same time, to supplement the comedy. With Armand Assante, Burt Reynolds, Ving Rhames, Robert Patrick. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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