George is a small-time crook just out of prison and now he manages to get a job driving a call girl from customer to customer. But his troubles just start when he agrees to find a young colleague from her King's Cross days...
The movie's ending is a little too neat for my taste. But in a movie like this, everything depends on atmosphere and character, and Mona Lisa knows exactly what it is doing.
The bracing peaks of image, acting, and narrative architecture handily win the day over a scenario that always feels more like a willfully engineered exercise than a fully plausible reality.
It's like watching the departure of an ocean liner. After all of the initial excitement, you're left on the dock, alone, wondering what all the fuss was about.
ReelViews
January 01, 2000
In an era when movies about love almost always invariably devolve into formulaic affairs, Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa stands out as an often-surprising, multi-layered achievement.
No wonder audiences have taken to this gritty romance as to a mongrel puppy; for at heart Mona Lisa is an old-fashioned poor-soul weepie, and George is less a Cagney rakehell than a Chaplin tramp.
