Trailer Park: Disclosure

Movie
Disclosure, released December 9 1994

Trailer Synopsis
Michael Douglas is super jazzed about the big promotion he’s getting at his tech-adjacent corporate job, but his status as cock of the walk is downgraded after Donald Sutherland gives the job to Demi Moore instead. And it turns out that not only is Moore one of Douglas’ former lovers, but she’s also a total lunatic who gropes him after hours and then accuses him of sexual harassment. He then tries to sue her for sexual harassment, and things get intense and ominous and potentially murderous as Douglas’ whole life starts to collapse around him. From the writer of Jurassic Park (hey cool!) and Rising Sun (uh-oh) comes a film from the director of Rain Man (okay), Bugsy (uhhhh) and Toys (oh shit!). Also Dennis Miller is in this because it’s 1994.

Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
For the most part. Douglas plays Tom Sanders, a prototypical corporate bounder whose life might be a little over-leveraged so it’s a good thing he’s got that big promotion coming. (Not that Douglas isn’t a good actor, but this character is basically Gordon Gekko Goes to Silicon Valley.) His boss Bob Garvin (Sutherland) pulls a switcheroo on him and awards the big chair to Meredith Johnson (Moore), a former flame of Sanders’ who is immediately hostile to his very existence. An after-hours rendezvous almost turns into a very upsetting in-office boning session, but Tom bails at the last second which short-circuits Meredith and sends her on a path of revenge that includes accusing Tom of sexual assault and blaming him for some sort of microchip problem in a factory somewhere.

The back half of the movie becomes less about the harassment plot and more about a convoluted corporate conspiracy involving all of our protagonists, but Disclosure was sold on the wild question of whether it was even possible for a woman to sexually harass a man. That’s all in the trailer, but what the trailer doesn’t tell you is that Disclosure is almost hypnotically boring. Once all the pieces are in place, there’s an hour of plot machinations that include a lot of people in meetings and Douglas exploring his company’s rudimentary VR system that makes everything look like you’re inside Super Mario 64.

What’s Weird About It?
Thanks to the horned-up profiles of its two stars, Disclosure often gets folded into the book of that era’s erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct (both of which starred Douglas). The trailer very much plays out like one of those movies, with it’s noir-ish shadows and red fonts. But the trailer is lying to us, because Disclosure is fundamentally unsexy. The only time clothes come off is in the first 20 minutes, and that’s a scene that turns into a sexual assault. The rest of the movie lacks even the basic titillation of even the worst David Caruso vehicles. (That did not stop me from re-reading the one dirty scene in the Michael Crichton novel. What a gross thing for a 12-year-old to get horned up to!)

There is no mention of Caroline Goodall, the actress who plays Tom’s wife. She would not have been a household name or anything, but she was coming off a fairly hot run that included roles in Cliffhanger and Schindler’s List. You wouldn’t know it based on the trailer, but she’s in it a lot (even though she’s given very little to do).

Identifying Crichton as the writer of Jurassic Park makes total sense, but Rising Sun is a deeply upsetting abomination of a book (though I guess the sell there is for the 1993 film that starred Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, which was a hit but stinks really hard).

I don’t immediately recognize the narrator, but it’s clearly not one of the three guys who tended to do these things in the early ‘90s.

Does It Spoil the Movie?
Can you really spoil something based on a huge best-selling novel? Disclosure was the first Crichton novel to drop after Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park trampled through the box office in the summer of 1993, and the rights must have been sold super early because that book arrives in January and this movie is out before Christmas. It sold gigantic numbers even though it’s a fairly nasty and angry piece of work that reads like a dumb person’s idea of what a cyberpunk story is. I like a couple of Crichton books, but that dude must have really been feeling himself around that time: Not only did he have a hugely successful Spielberg adaptation of one of his best books, but ER was already becoming a ratings juggernaut for NBC and pre-teens like myself were hungrily buying up his books (I remember feeling genuine anticipation for the 1996 release of Airframe, a book about some kind of intrigue in the airplane construction business).

Final Analysis
I just watched Disclosure and have already forgotten most of it because it is so unbelievably dull. The trailer presents a movie that is far more twisty and intriguing, so I have to give it credit for selling people on the idea even though it’s based on lies. Plenty of people were sold, too: Disclosure was a huge hit at the box office that holiday season despite a lot of competition from The Santa Clause and Dumb and Dumber. It ultimately brought in $83 million, which is wild for an R-rated movie that is not very good. I would love to see the movie that is presented in the Disclosure trailer, but Disclosure ain’t it. 7/10