James Wheeler (Rourke) is a slime-ball poor boy-made-good property tycoon, Claudia Lirones (Bisset) the unlikely Alexis Carrington-style international banker and Emily Reed (Otis) her gorgeous protegee-cum-lawyer in this ludicrous pseudo-erotic love triangle thriller, not unsurprisingly dug from the very same creative depths responsible for 9 1/2 Weeks.
This time round, the heaving bodies relocate from New York to Rio De Janeiro -a location apparently chosen solely because it provides a half-decent excuse for loud South American lambada music, and accompanying revelry and fornication - where Lirones and Reed busy themselves with a deal to bring together a consortium of Chinese investors to bail out an undercapitalised hotel development. Wheeler, meanwhile, gets his kicks out of emotionally manipulating Otis' wide-eyed innocence - and just about anybody else with a sexual hang-up - and plotting to scupper his former lover Lirones' fiscal plans. Nothing is what it seems and the conclusion is as contrived as it is corny.
Thanks, however, to a liberal helping of cliches - climactically crashing sea waves at sexually sensitive moments, no less - an all-round effort to reach new heights of ham-acting and Rourke's unintentionally self-incriminatory lines ("The teachers thought I was retarded"), this rather seedy little film does at least provide the occasional laugh.