V.I. Warshawski (R)
IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Fandango; Google Play; Movies Anywhere; YouTube

This is loosely based on a book I haven't read. The movie came out in 1991, and I remember renting it on VHS sometime in the early '90s, but when I watched it again in 2025 on Blu-ray, I didn't remember anything about it besides the title and that it starred Kathleen Turner as a private investigator. It didn't do well critically and it was a box office bomb, but I kind of liked it. Not a lot, but enough that I'm glad I re-watched it. Not sure if I'd ever feel the need to watch it again, though. I feel like the movie is trying to be a cross between a hard-boiled detective story and a screwball comedy, which is kind of a weird mix. I don't want to say it fails, but I don't think it succeeds spectacularly, and I can understand anyone not liking it.

So anyway, V.I. Warshawski meets a guy named Bernard "Boom-Boom" Grafalk in a bar, and they hit it off. Later she goes home and finds her ex, a reporter named Murray Ryerson, had let himself into her apartment. A little later, Boom-Boom shows up with his 13-year-old daughter, Kat (Angela Goethals), and wants V.I. to look after her for awhile. She reluctantly agrees, but when Boom-Boom doesn't return by the time he said he would, Kat leaves to go find him, and V.I. accompanies her. It turns out he had been killed in an explosion down at the docks. So Kat "hires" V.I. to find out who is responsible for her father's death. Meanwhile, her mother, Paige, and stepfather, Trumble (one of Boom-Boom's brothers), want to get Kat to come stay with them, but Kat is very much against this. The two main suspects in Boom-Boom's murder are Trumble and their other brother, Horton. Throughout V.I.'s investigation, she gets some help from Murray, as well as clashing with police lieutenant Bobby Mallory (Charles Durning). At one point, she gets kidnapped by goons working for a guy named Earl Smeissen (Wayne Knight), who warns her to lay off the Grafalk case, but of course she doesn't.

Well, I don't want to reveal any more of the plot, except to say that V.I. does eventually solve the case. And it's not an altogether happy ending. I liked the main characters. And I liked how tough V.I. was. I didn't think the dialogue always worked very well, but other than that, it was an okay story. I almost feel like it's a shame there were no sequels, but not quite.