Brooke Shields, as a documentary filmmaker hanging out with Phillips and her gang, and Robert Downey Jr., as her gay husband, are a remarkable comedy team. Shields, who in the old days was nearly always a wooden presence, is game and canny as an opportunistic scene maker donning the role of cultural anthropologist. And Downey, who doesn't even try to be subtle, swans about outrageously. They have the movie's funniest sequence. Tyson responds by trying to strangle him.
Shields provides the perfect capper.
After calming things down and getting her husband safely out of Tyson's clutches, she can't resist coming on to him, either. Toback's love of improvisational immediacy is apparent in about half of the scenes. The formlessness in the improvised scenes is even more glaring in contrast to the scripted ones, most of which are painfully artificial. But the cardboard familiarity of these characters and their situation undermines Toback's determination to get at the messiness of contemporary race relations. In this movie, the gangstas really are gangsters.