Malkovich is very precise here. You can see something inside him snap when a man to whom he's trying to sell some illegally-obtained Renaissance drawings refers to him and his criminal associate as "you people." Later when an English neighbor, not realizing he's in the room, puts him down for being a typical American with more money than taste, Ripley doesn't accept the man's embarrassed situation-saving cordiality. He moves toward the poor man, meeting each succeeding bland remark with an ambiguous-but-confrontational single word: "Meaning?" I don't think anybody but Malkovich could so simply have given that word the tense combination of aggression and neurotic defensiveness, a feeling that Ripley when pricked is capable of almost anything in reaction and is beyond caring about reacting publicly.

This is the kind of ironic romance in which amoral knights are engaged in criminal quests, but unlike a heist picture with a charismatic leader, the movie doesn't expect you to root for the bad guys. Ripley's adopts as his quest the corruption of the Englishman who insulted him by drawing him into his criminal network so that he will lose the smugness with which he put Ripley down. There's something terribly appealing about an aesthete-sociopath who is neither a melodramatic villain nor a victim, and Malkovich is perfect at setting the neutral emotional tone for the movie. Once Ripley has his revenge he doesn't even wallow in it. The man he insulted is harmed more than Ripley intended, but once that has happened it's just another focus for speculation about identity, about people's varying tolerances for the varieties of experience.

The problem with the movie is that the corruption of the nasty but technically innocent young family man involves a centerpiece of suspenseful, violent action in which Ripley is not involved, and though he returns afterwards, he's been displaced. And the man Ripley destroys moves to the center but lacks dimensions. His story verges on tragedy but we can't be sure what the man's flaw was--whatever arrogance caused him to insult Ripley or perhaps his susceptibility to the blood-money temptation Ripley presents him with. Ripley's character doesn't develop, he merely manages a situation gone awry, and the man who does develop is too opaque. Ripley is both puppetmaster and commentator but not the protagonist. It's Ripley's game, but not his story.

All the same, the movie is very suavely made (which may be part of the problem--a perfectly smooth surface from beginning to end) and the suspense works. And even if Malkovich is out of the plot's strongest current, he makes a fascinating still figure, a man so thoroughly given over to polishing his surfaces you're almost seduced into believing it doesn't matter that he's hollow. You've seen better movies though perhaps not lately. Rent it and form your own reservations.