The Color Of Night (1994)  

Review: written November 2025

Jaw dropping – for all the wrong reasons.

Inspired to watch a Bruce Willis movie after watching the recent excellent documentary on his current health, I found one I had no memory of. The Color of Night, ostensibly a mystery thriller, a whodunnit, with an erotic edge. Alas, turns out my memory loss was probably deliberate on my part, as this ended up being a lurid campy endeavour, devoid of thrills, with sweaty naked montages in lieu of eroticism, and the only mystery being how it ended up being so bad.

Bruce plays a psychologist from New York, who travels to stay with his friend in Los Angeles after a fatal incident with a patient trauamatises him into suffering psychosomatic colour blindness, and he decides to stop practicing psychology. When his friend (Scott Bakula) then gets murdered, the suspects include his eclectic group of clients, who all appear to have their own motives. Meanwhile, Bruce falls into a torrid affair with a young woman called Rose (Jane March). But is it possible she is not all she seems?

Ok, well not much of a mystery there for sure. The ‘action’ plays out cranked up to 11, as does the acting from a list of actors who should really have known better, including the normally reliable Brad Dourif and Lance Henriksen. Characterisation is cartoonish, the colour palette heightened along with everything else, and the plot both predictable and unlikely. Much was said about the extent of Jane March disrobing for her scenes in the movie, but to be honest as inexperienced as she was as an actor, her performance is one of the more tolerable aspects of the movie.

It feels like too much of a parody of the genre to take seriously, and yet takes itself seriously enough to mean you can’t even relish it as absurd entertainment.

A staggering misfire.