Milk Money

A deeply strange little movie, Milk Money follows three adolescent school chums as they meet and befriend a prostitute (Melanie Griffith’s V) on the run from several vicious figures – with the narrative detailing the friendship that eventually develops between V and one of the boys’ fathers (Ed Harris’ Tom). There’s more weirdness to the plot than just that, certainly, and yet filmmaker Richard Benjamin manages to deliver a fairly conventional coming-of-age story that rarely (if ever) embraces the rampant quirkiness of John Mattson’s screenplay – with the movie, for the most part, coming off as a fairly generic (yet impressively watchable) drama that benefits substantially from the affable performances. (This is especially true of the typically winning work from Griffith and Harris, with the latter delivering a surprisingly down-to-earth turn that proves awfully tough to resist.) The almost two hour running time ultimately does prove to be too much for the oddball narrative to bear, and there’s little doubt that the whole thing peters out to a fairly significant degree long before the climactic car chase (!) rolls around – which effectively secures Milk Money‘s place as an erratic endeavor that’s undoubtedly better than its reputation might’ve indicated.

**1/2 out of ****

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