Giving Mrs. Tiger Woods a run for her money as the most humiliated celebrity of the month, Russell Crowe accepts a third-banana role in the laughable weepie “Tenderness.”
Crowe is a Buffalo detective laden with fluffy feathered hair, a redneck mustache, a semi-comatose wife and the chore of reciting embarrassing Sensitive Guy narration like, “Some people live for their pain. It’s all they’ve got.”
The real stars of the piece are Jon Foster (an actor in his mid-20s playing 18 and, in flashbacks, 15) as a notorious, compulsive killer just out of juvie who is driving to Albany to meet a groupie who wants to date him because he’s a bad boy, and Sophie Traub as another star-struck fan who stows away in his car during the trip. This second girl, a chatty depressive, seems to want him to kill her, which works out pretty well because he keeps thinking about killing her, too.
Crowe, who spends the movie trudging along behind them and waxing lyrical about pain and pleasure, must be hoping no one sees this mawkish blunder. He will probably get his wish.