A flashy, initially enticing, but finally preposterous melodrama that wastes the presence of its stars Robert Redford and Demi Moore, Indecent Proposal eventually resigns itself to Adrian Lyne's strenuous over-direction of its rather simple tale. What could have been a sharp, darkly observant examination of greed and the boundaries of sexual relations in marriage is rendered a pallid soaper that wouldn't seem out of place on daytime television. The screenplay gives the actors a lot of windy speeches about morals and beliefs but fails to make them interesting on a human level, and Moore's wildly uneven character seems yanked by the whims of the writing, never with much believability. Despite scores of negative reviews by major critics, Indecent Proposal became a huge success, possibly on the assumption that it would provide the nudity and steamy sex alluded to in its previews; in actuality, the film contains almost none of either.