Fair game is The Perils of Pauline with a hygene fetish. It stars Cindy Crawford as a woman who is on the run from a madman and stops every 15 minutes or so to take a shower whether she needs it or not. When she isn't running she's showering, which would bother me if she were played by, let's say, Ernest Borgnine but since it's the lovely Miss Crawford I'm willing to let that go. The problem is that the villains keep shooting at her and interrupting her showering duties.

In the movie she plays (looking up the name) Kate McQueen, a hot-shot lawyer who looks like no lawyer one is likely to find in real life. Her skirts are short enough to get her thrown out of court but leave young boys in the audience plenty to ponder. She is about as believeable as a lawyer as Nicole Kidman was as a psychiatrist in Batman Forever.

But covering the fact that she doesn't know the law from piece of plywood is the plot device that she is being pursued by a stop-at-nothing movie billionare with a score to settle. He is (looking up the name) Col. Ilya Kazak, a former member of the KGB who is chasing her for reasons too stupid to even look up. That's a nice way of saying he's one of those Movie Villians who has an army of henchmen, helicopters, fast cars, weapons but also bad aim and a serious lack of common sense.

He hasn't a bit of use for common sense because after - no kidding - TEN repeated attempts to kill her when he finally captures her and orders his hit squad that she is not to be touched. This the an excuse for the scene where Cindy is bound with her hands over her head.

He's got interesting goals but what I'm interested in is the technology he possesses. Being a standard Movie Villian he, of course, has Standard Movie Villain Technology. You know, one of those computers where you can type anyone's name anywhere at any time and it will immediatly pull up their driver's license and a satellite tracking device that can tell you exactly where he or she is instantly and where they are going. I'd like to get these guys after my great uncle Richard when he's on an eight day stupor.

Since no one associated with the film thinks that Cindy Crawford would be capable of handling herself in the face of such problems, she is given a love interest, a Baldwin love interest! Billy this time as a cop named (looking it up . . . ah who cares), he's a cop-who-doesn't-play-by-the-rules.

Sadly, the movie's most memorable assets are it's lapses in judgement. Example: Crawford is taken to a safe house where she goes and takes a shower. Bullets fly up from the floor and Cindy bolts naked from the shower as bullets fly around her. Somehow from the shower to the hero's arms she magically slips into a sexy boustier. THEN he takes her to another safe house where she immediately takes ANOTHER shower before being assaulted again. Again, the Borgnine theory still goes.

What follows are a series of special effects occasionally interrupted by a shower which flows immediatly into another chase scene. It's nothing you haven't seen before, just your standard chase-shower-blow stuff up movie. We get long ganders at Miss Crawford in the movie whether we need them or not. You can almost hear producer Joel Silver telling her "Oh that's okay sweetie, you just go take a shower and let us men handle all the movie stuff". She doesn't exactly do much to bolter the image of women in the movies. Looking at her performance I would say "you've come a long way baby" but I'd be lying.