Psychiatrist Dr. Isaac Barr (Richard Gere) is treating Diana Baylor (Uma Thurman). His testimony gets Pepe Carrero released angering police detective Huggins (Keith David). Diana's sister Heather Evans (Kim Basinger) comes to his office. They have an affair but her husband Jimmy Evans (Eric Roberts) is a violent Greek gangster.

This tries to be a Hitchcockian thriller using every superficial ways. The acting is melodramatically broad. Even the music is reminiscent of the most popular Hitchcock. It feels old and badly overwrought. It's a showy copy of better movies. It would be more compelling to NOT show the killing. It would allow the audience to guess at the truth of the incident and build paranoia which the great master would have done. The movie has to understand that the psychobabble is meaningless to the normal audience. This relies on us believing the jury would buy the psychobabble. For a movie relying on psychiatry, these people are simple-minded. I don't feel for any of these characters. I certainly don't care about Gere's character and by extension, I don't care about this movie.

Kind of disappointing considering the cast -- Richard Gere as the morally upright but slightly imprudent psychiatrist, Uma Thurman as his "caterpillar" patient, and Kim Basinger as Thurman's seductive older sister.

To help him understand Thurman's problems, Gere seeks out Basinger and winds up making furious love to her on their first date. You ought to see them, rutting around like two sea lions in heat. If that isn't disgusting, I don't know what is. The scene's only redeeming feature is that Kim Basinger isn't particularly modest. The two were my supporting players in the tasteful and artistic "No Mercy," and I had to practically carry them through the movie.

Basinger, lamentably, is married to one of those narcissistic, madly possessive Circum-Mediterranean gangsters who has muscles all over his body as well as inside his head. This is Eric Roberts in his perfect evil greaseball mode. He dominates Basinger and makes her do humiliating sexual things, which is perhaps his one good idea before she bashes his head in with one of his own dumb bells.

It seems she suffers from "pathological intoxication." One sip of alcohol and she becomes violently psychotic, and she had innocently sipped some alcohol-based cough medicine just before the homicide. Gere helps her shape her defense, brings in his friend, Paul Guilfoyle, to serve as her lawyer, and she gets off with a "not guilty by reason of temporary insanity." Thereafter, it gets twisted.

A little too twisted if you ask me. By the end I could hardly tell who was who or what was what.

It's pretty thrilling all the way through. It's just that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. Thurman's character begins in cahoots with her sister, then betrays her, then helps her escape from the funny farm, then takes over her identity and murderous quirks. Why? It would take more than a shrink to determine that. It would require a mind reader, or maybe a rabidly commercial screenwriter.

It's nicely acted and the location photography is picturesque -- San Francisco at its most glorious, the Golden Gate Bridge is in every other shot.

But it's cheap too. The director uses every cliché in the book regardless of whether they fit together. The climax at the top of a light house has the railing collapsing and Gere dangling over the crashing breakers -- in a howling electrical storm the likes of which Point Reyes has never seen. The fulsome orchestral score belongs to the genus Slasher.

And, as I say, the plot is dizzying and at times makes no sense. Okay. Basinger is accused of murder, which she has in fact committed. The only question is whether a condition called "pathological intoxication" exists or not. The prosecution calls an expert witness, a haughty woman psychiatrist with a bony face and a foreign accent. She declares that the condition does not exist except in the minds of defense counsels. Why doesn't she believe there is any such thing? Because there is no physical evidence. It doesn't show up in brain scans or blood tests, she points out. An experienced defense attorney would have jumped all over her and asked if there were any "physical evidence" that schizophrenia exists. There isn't, but nobody can deny that the condition is real.

Anyway, in a sense, it's an exciting movie and soothing too, watching cliché follow cliché while common sense flies out the window. Kind of a ritualistic experience, like listening to a meaningless but reassuringly familiar pop tune.

FINAL ANALYSIS sees director Phil Joanou outdoing Brian de Palma in his Hitchcock homages, for this is a Hitchcockian thriller through and through. It's the story of a psychiatrist who becomes involves with a beautiful blonde client, and along the way throws in various scenarios including a courtroom showdown and some high-rise peril too.

It's an extraordinarily derivative film, but it manages to be great fun with it, and that's what counts, after all. FINAL ANALYSIS has dated in the same way that most movies from the 1990s have; every scene is overblown and overstylised, and the characters act in hugely unbelievable ways. The writers never let realism or credibility get in the way of another plot twist or suspense-wracked set-piece.

Richard Gere is on autopilot here and rather bland with it: there's nothing much to like about his boring character, and he's played the same role (of a guy falling head over heels for a pretty girl) so many times that he seems bored. Kim Basinger is better, really getting her teeth into a different kind of role from the ones she usually plays, but the real stand-outs are the supporting players. Uma Thurman is edgy and burns up the screen, Keith David's broad comic relief really works, and Eric Roberts is incredibly sleazy and frightening as a controlling husband.

I was delighted to discover, as I watched, that I had no idea where the story was going. Plot twist developed upon plot twist and I was frequently surprised and shocked by many of them. Of course, it's not really anything that hasn't been done before - and better, too - but it's a nice piece of entertainment for thriller and suspense fans nonetheless.