Plunkett & Macleane (1999)

The setting is a shadowy aristocratic ball in 1749 London, but the soundtrack is disco, and the mood is drenched in decadence as James Macleane (Jonny Lee Miller), a bandit posing as a para-gon of society, makes bedroom eyes at the beauty-marked, heaving-bosomed Lady Rebecca (Liv Tyler). In the background, a bisexual fop (Alan Cumming) folds his red lips like a pair of rose petals.

As long as it's willing to be a lavishly sarcastic anti-Merchant Ivory costume drama, complete with bewigged popinjays sneering at the nasty little indulgences around them, PLUNKETT & MACLEANE is watchable in a facile, trashy way. Unfortunately, most of the movie is mired in sludge, slime, mud, blood, and studiously dank cinematography. Macleane and his partner, the dour sharpshooter Plunkett (Robert Carlyle), carve out a career for themselves as masked ''gentlemen'' highwaymen, but the movie finds precious little intrigue or adventure in their holdups and escapes. Miller and Carlyle, reunited from Trainspot- ting, both have presence to spare, but not a lot to do. The film buries them in photogenic squalor, as if depicting the 18th century as profoundly unclean were enough to seize our imagination. C

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