The key film in Alec Baldwin's antihero oeuvre is Harold Becker's Malice, a vastly entertaining hunk of bologna that asks the audience to believe (warning: I'm revealing plot here, so skip to the next paragraph if you want to rent the movie) that the demure young wife (Nicole Kidman) of a tweedy college dean (Bill Pullman) is actually a heartless con woman who arranges to have her own ovaries surgically removed by her physician lover (Baldwin) in a complex insurance scam.
Dumb, you bet, but Malice gets by on its woozy dialogue and the skill of its three stars. Baldwin, particularly, is a wonderful figure of bullying, priapic arrogance as Dr. Jed Hill, a figure stranded somewhere between Double Indemnity and Nietzsche. ''You ask me if I have a God complex?'' Hill spits out during a malpractice hearing. ''Let me tell you something. I am God.'' B
