Once at the top of Hollywood’s A-List, by the mid-1990s director William Friedkin hadn’t made a solid box office hit in over two decades. In desperate need of (in the terms of his favorite sport) an easy lay-up, the former Oscar winner was reduced to banging out a Basic Instinct knockoff that frankly seemed beneath his talents. Although the 1995 thriller Jade didn’t exactly turn his fortunes around, Friedkin later claimed that it was his favorite of all the films he’d made. I can’t say I understand what he was thinking with that.

Jade was another box office dud for the director, as well as a critical punching bag that might have cleaned up at the Razzie Awards if not for the fortune of being released the same year as the even-more-reviled Showgirls. Not coincidentally, both movies had screenplays written by Joe Eszterhas.

Title:	Jade
Year of Release:	1995
Director:	William Friedkin
Watched On:	Paramount+ (via Amazon Prime)
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Showtime Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Hard though it may be to understand in retrospect, Eszterhas was a hot item in Hollywood for a brief moment after the success of Basic Instinct blew everyone’s socks off. The fact that the screenplay was the least interesting part of that movie didn’t seem to register with any of the producers or studio executives shelling out big money for the writer to give them another script exactly the same as Basic Instinct… except maybe just a little different. Among his fans were Robert Evans, the legendary (if erratic) producer of Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, and Sherry Lansing, then Chair of Paramount Pictures. If nowhere near Basic Instinct numbers, the two of them did reasonably well with the Eszterhas-scripted Sliver and hoped for the same from Jade. When looking for a director with some critical cachet to make this look like a prestige production, who could be better suited than Lansing’s own husband, the man who’d made The French Connection and The Exorcist back in the day?

For his part, despite claiming to like the script, Friedkin set about rewriting almost the entire thing anyway – to the point that a disgruntled Eszterhas wanted his name taken off it, and had to be placated by another big contract from the studio (that never resulted in anything). Nevertheless, however much of it the director may have changed, the final product’s dumb and nonsensical plot, shitty dialogue, and brazen misogyny strongly retain Eszterhas’ stamp all over them.

In addition to a hopeful comeback vehicle for Friedkin, Jade was also intended to be a breakout role for David Caruso, the television star who’d infamously walked away from the ratings smash NYPD Blue on bad terms after just one season, determined to prove himself a feature film leading man. In the movie, he plays a character with the suspiciously similar-sounding name of David Corelli, an ambitious Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco.

The plot has Corelli catching the case when a rich guy is brutally murdered in what appears to be a kinky sex crime. That the movie has no idea that a prosecuting attorney is not the same thing as a police detective is just one of the screenplay’s many hilarious failings. Throughout the film, Corelli is seen working crime scenes alongside actual cops, interrogating suspects, and countless other things that would manifestly not be his job. Nor do any of the other characters seem bothered by the blatant conflict of interest when the lead suspect turns out to be Corelli’s ex-lover, who is currently the wife of his best friend.

For the femme fatale role, Friedkin cast Linda Fiorentino, an actress who’d made a small splash the prior year in the wildly entertaining indie neo-noir The Last Seduction. Sadly, the material here isn’t nearly as juicy, and mostly leaves the actress stranded with little to do. Her character Trina is a confusing mess of contradictions, likely due to all the rewrites. In one scene, she’s a clinical psychologist giving a lecture about killers who experience hysterical blindness and dissociative disorder. Yet she’s also an art acquisition agent who furnished the home of the victim. In either case, she moonlights as a high-class call girl and dominatrix known as Jade. The movie would like to keep you guessing as to whether she’s a cold and manipulative killer or an innocent patsy, but the eventual resolution feels totally arbitrary. I have no doubt the ending was written both ways, and Friedkin flipped a coin to choose one.

Other key roles are played by Chazz Palminteri as Trina’s husband (a high-powered defense attorney), Michael Biehn as the ostensible lead detective who nonetheless takes a backseat to Corelli, Richard Crenna as the dirty governor with secrets to hide, and model Angie Everhart as another call girl with ties to the victim and to the mysterious Jade.

Its ludicrous plot notwithstanding, Jade ultimately amounts to a competent but rote thriller that’s stylishly, if impersonally, directed by Friedkin. Because the filmmaker was renowned for the car chases in The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A., he must have felt pressured to throw one in here as well. Unfortunately, the result is inferior to his prior work, heavily derivative of the famous San Francisco chase scenes in Bullitt, and largely implausible. (At a certain point, Corelli would have more luck getting out of the car and walking up to the killer instead.) Meanwhile, the sex scenes in this erotic thriller are very tame, with limited nudity mostly seen in reflections, photographs, or a fuzzy VHS recording.

Jade is a whiff of a movie that probably didn’t need to be made. Even with an Oscar-winning director at the helm, the film has little to distinguish it from a dozen other, equally inferior Basic Instinct clones. It may not be the worst movie William Friedkin made in his career but, contrary to the filmmaker’s own opinion, it’s indisputably a far cry from the best.

Video Streaming

An extended cut of Jade with twelve additional minutes of footage was released on VHS back in the day and aired on a few cable channels (and reportedly streamed on Hulu for a while), but seems to have vanished into the ether in the meantime. All other home video copies, as well as all current broadcast and streaming outlets, offer only the original R-rated theatrical cut.

Paramount released Jade on Blu-ray back in 2010 but, to be perfectly blunt, this isn’t a movie I’ll ever feel a need to own. Streaming is fine. To that end, because Showtime currently has the broadcast rights, I found the movie on Paramount+. Further, because I subscribe to Paramount+ through the Amazon Prime ecosystem, I chose to watch it using the the Prime Video app. In my experience (and I checked a few scenes to confirm it’s the case here as well), 1080p content tends to look slightly better through the Prime Video interface than through Paramount+ directly, due to Paramount’s very shoddy compression.

The difference between the two platforms isn’t huge, but every small bit helps with a video master this dated. The 16:9 full-screen image (marginally opened up from the original 1.85:1) is very soft and noisy. Colors are also a little flat. It looks very much like something you’d watch on cable. I haven’t seen the Blu-ray edition and don’t plan to, but I’d expect it to be sourced from the same master.

On the other hand, the Dolby 5.1 audio sounds very nice. James Horner’s score has some decent depth. Although dialogue is perhaps a bit forward in the mix, likely due to a lot of ADR overdubbing, that’s a fairly common issue with Friedkin movies. The surround channels are used very aggressively with lots of fun pinpoint directionality of things like squealing tires and car smashes during the big chase scene.

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