MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Temp’: A Yuppie Paranoia Thriller

In any contest for witless movie thrillers of 1993, “The Temp” (citywide) may carry off both the Grand Tweet and the Golden Bomb. Despite some stiff recent competition, like “Knight Moves,” this is a suspense movie dopey beyond imagining, ludicrous beyond belief.

Even given its marketing-hook premise--a troubled young executive (Timothy Hutton) meets what seems to be the temporary secretary from hell (Lara Flynn Boyle)--director Tom Holland and writer Kevin Falls have constructed an edifice of unusual, almost nonstop nonsense. From first scene to last, “The Temp” is totally predictable; its cliches perform a vital function: They’re the only things that keep the story coherent.

The movie shoves together Hutton as the twitchy, slightly unkempt junior executive Peter Derns and Boyle as his fill-in secretary Kris Bolin, a trim little bombshell in short skirts and clipped hair, who starts taking over his life.

Well, she should. Derns is a mess. We first see him in a psychiatrist’s office, hinting at past schizophrenia. His marriage has fallen apart and the company where he works--Mrs. Appleby’s Baking Goods--has just succumbed to a hostile takeover. The head of Appleby’s, Charlene Towne, is played by Faye Dunaway, in one of her off-the-deep-end moods. Her speech is brittle and her eyes are wild.

Kris seems a godsend: typing up a storm, rearranging Derns’ chaotic life, offering him lip-smacking glimpses of plunging neckline. The movie links Kris’ sexual allure with the erupting violence--and that’s only part of its misogyny. When the bloodshed starts, with rival executives stung to death by bees or hanging themselves, it’s like some curious Puritan plague triggered by Kris’ allure or ambition, or both.

Through it all, “The Temp” tries to work the street of movies like “Hand That Rocks the Cradle” or “Single White Female”; it’s another yuppie paranoia thriller, though here we’re invited to consider other angles. Is Kris innocent and Peter paranoid? Are there other plots? Holland, who wrote and directed “Fright Night” and “Child’s Play,” has one of those glossy, sock-in-the-eye visual styles that seem designed to make good trailers. But here the gloss becomes offensive; it only accentuates the dumbness and rot. Hutton seems to be sinking into funk as the movie progresses, and Boyle keeps her villainy so clipped and tight, her performance is almost like a pop video.

As for Dunaway, she has a demeaning, empty role and she’s billed seventh--before four other actors who have briefer, more demeaning roles. “The Temp” (MPAA-rated R for violence, language and sensuality) is a movie with such a faulty sense of social trends that it has Hutton arguing that the ‘90s are going to be like the ‘50s (that was the ‘80s, Tim) and such stereotypical thrill strategies that every suspense set-piece plays like an auto commercial.

In a way, this movie reverses the fairy-tale plot of “Working Girl”--with Kris rising from temp secretary to major executive in what seems a few weeks. Here the working girl might be evil, murderous, the male helpless in a world of rapacious females who want sex or his job.

“The Temp” also, on one level, presents career women as deranged and deadly, striking maybe unintentionally, a Marilyn Quayle-ish blow for regarding women as essentially child-bearers. But it’s silly to take offense at anything as silly as “The Temp.” After a while, the movie does achieve one of its aims. You begin to share Peter’s paranoia, to see yourself as trapped in a nightmare, victim of a conspiracy to bore and exasperate you.

‘The Temp’

Timothy Hutton: Peter Derns

Lara Flynn Boyle: Kris Bolin

Faye Dunaway: Charlene Towne

Dwight Schultz: Roger Jasser

A Paramount Pictures presentation presentation of a David Permut production. Director Tom Holland. Producers David Permut, Tom Engelman. Executive producer Howard W. Koch Jr. Screenplay by Kevin Falls. Cinematographer Steve Yaconelli. Editor Scott Conrad. Costumes Tom Rand. Music Frederic Talgorn. Production design Joel Schiller. Art director Gordon W. Clark. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (Violence, language, sensuality).