Although it has since achieved a cult status all its own, when John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley opened in 1996, it was deep in the shadow of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), the hipster-criminal-cool nadir of postmodern narrative play. Even if we recognize the original and uniquely clever aspects of Herzfeld’s film, there are simply too many similarities to Tarantino’s striking Palm d’Or winner to ignore: a plot of interlocking stories, a pair of bickering hitmen, an overly ambitious professional athlete, a gritty San Fernando Valley setting, and Eric Stoltz (although here he plays a cop instead of a drug dealer).

Tarantino comparisons aside, 2 Days in the Valley is a darkly enjoyable, but uneven film, one that offers a lot of crude pleasures, but one that also sometimes leave you scratching your head. It has its darkly funny moments and there is good suspense woven throughout, but at other times it feels unduly cruel and derivative, and its overall effect is one of diminishing rewards. It starts out with great promise, hits a peak near the middle, and then comes a bit unraveled in the last third. The smart and invigorating plot contains a handful of crafty surprises, but it only sustains itself for about two/thirds of the film.

To outline the plot in too much detail would detract from the pleasures the film has to offer because each detail, character interaction, and plot turn is significant (although not always immediately so). I can tell you that the focal point of the film is a murder by a slick, sadistic professional hitman named Lee Woods (James Spader) and his older, more humane partner, Dosmo Pizzo (Danny Aiello), who has just come out of retirement. The victim is a man of deeply questionably character named Roy Foxx (Peter Horton), and he is shot in bed next to his ex-wife, Becky (Teri Hatcher), an aspiring Olympic skiier. And, while the hit seems to a success, not everything is what it seems. Through a series of conveniences, contrivances, more contrivances, and plain bad luck, a whole cast of characters winds up having some involvement in the murder and its aftermath, including two vice squad cops (a very scruffy-looking Jeff Daniels and a very clean-cut Eric Stoltz), a suicidally depressed movie director (real-life director Paul Mazursky), a smug British art dealer who recently passed a kidney stone (Greg Cruttwell), his dedicated assistant (Glenne Headly), and his half-sister (Marsha Mason). Oh, and did I mention Spader’s icy Norwegian lover, Helga (Charlize Theron in her screen debut)?

On paper, this sounds like a potential mess, but Herzfeld manages to make an interesting and lively script out of all the characters, carefully placing them at crucial plot points so they can get in on or get wrapped up in the action. And, while the characters are mostly broad types who are defined by one or two quirky character traits, Herzfeld develops several of them into endearing figures, particularly Aiello’s aging hitman and Mazursky’s depressed auteur (who uses his Emmy Award as a toilet paper holder). All of the characters are driven by some kind of frustration, whether it be Stoltz’s desire to be a homicide detective or Hatcher’s anger with narrowly missing the Olympic ski team. Most of the characters get their due by the end in one way or another, although a few are just kind of abandoned.

The centrality of frustration in the film is not surprising given Herzfeld’s own career at that point. After spending most of the 1970s as a bit actor on television and a few movies, he started writing scripts, which led to his writing-directing debut, the notorious box-office disaster Two of a Kind (1982), which reunited Grease stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. He then toiled for more than a decade helming made-for-television movies, many of them ripped from the tabloid headlines (hello, Amy Fisher!), before he returned to the big screen with 2 Days in the Valley, for which he was able to assemble a surprisingly impressive cast. And, while it is no Pulp Fiction (there’s that Tarantino comparison again …), 2 Days in the Valley is witty and bracing enough in its own right, with Herzfeld taking a genre and working it to his own engaging ends.

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