In the last decade quality of Hollywood films declined, and that phenomenon didn't manifest itself solely in the realms of the finished products. Even the promotional trailers were getting worse with time, and movie advertising became as bad as the movies themselves. One of the rare films that should pride itself with exceptional state of-the-art trailer is Ruby Cairo, 1992 adventure thriller directed by Graeme Clifford.
The heroine of this film is Bessie Faro (played by Andie MacDowell), mother of three children and wife of Johnny Faro (played by Viggo Mortensen), owner of air cargo company. Bessie's idyllic life starts to fall apart when she gets a word about her husband dying in air crash and the company going bankrupt. In Vera Cruz she finds that her husband actually stashed large sums of money on various off-shore accounts. Using her husband's baseball cards as the only clue she starts traveling across the world in order to retrieve those funds. However, in some cases someone is always one step ahead, emptying those accounts. The trail leads Bessie to Cairo, where she would receive assistance by Fergus Larb (played by Liam Neeson), humanitarian pilot who would lead her to the unexpected discovery.
The trailer for Ruby Cairo is a masterpiece of movie advertising because it suggests an exciting and interesting thriller set in exotic locations. In reality, Ruby Cairo is mostly disorganised mess of a movie, with contrived and not very believable plot and mostly disinterested cast members, especially Liam Neeson in tragically undeveloped role. Among many other things, the subplot involving baseball cards is going to be incomprehensible for most of the audience that lives outside USA. On the other hand, Graeme Clifford tries to compensate inadequacies of the content with style. The movie features truly impressive shots of exotic Egyptian locations, and the musical score by John Barry would remind viewers of Bond movies, especially The Spy Who Loved Me. However, apart from providing some interesting information about multi-cultural nature of modern Egypt, Ruby Cairo mostly fails to arouse viewers' attention and it is quite understandable why it sank to oblivion almost immediately after its production.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on September 25th 2001)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/69035-ruby-cairo?language=en-US
Critic: AA
