Plot
Nikki Finn is a carefree, young woman, who is always dressed up in leather jacket and skirt, with fire-red lips, platinum bob hair and speaking in a high-pitched voice. One day, her boyfriend Johnny uncovers two men stealing money out of a trust fund and takes pictures of the theft. Johnny puts the pictures in a safety deposit box and gives Nikki the key, for safekeeping. The thieves catch Johnny and murder him, then frame Nikki by putting his body into the trunk of her car. Nikki is sentenced to seven years in prison.
After four years, the story presents tax attorney Loudon Trott (Griffin Dunne) on a busy day. He is getting married to the daughter of one of the richest men in New York, Simon Worthington. Loudon's bride Wendy Worthington (Haviland Morris) is a selfish woman who is more consumed in her wedding plans than in the well-being of her fiancée. Loudon, on the other hand, has a number of duties entrusted to him by Mr. Worthington. First he has to pick up a cougar for an exotic animal activist named Montgomery Bell (John Mills), then to pick up Nikki, and lastly he has to make sure that Nikki catches the next bus to her hometown of Philadelphia.
Nikki, meanwhile, is determined to catch the actual thieves and bring forth the truth. After meeting Loudon, Nikki cons him into taking her shopping. After taking a Rolls Royce into Harlem to buy a gun - and nearly being arrested during a police raid - she explains her story to Loudon who believes that she is innocent, and decides to help her. She's also on the run from a pimp named Raoul (Coati Mundi) and his lackey Benny (Dennis Burkley), the people who killed Johnny. Only after dangling off a car smashed through the top floor of a parking garage, does he tell her the bank and the box number of Nikki's slain boyfriend.
Afterward Nikki vanishes with the cougar (who she names "Murray"). Loudon visits Mr. Bell to apologize for losing the animal, to find Nikki had delivered Murray and was waiting for him at Mr. Bell's home. He has created a Brazilian rainforest filled with animals on top of his roof. There Nikki and Loudon — who had become close with each other on their journey — express their love for each other. Loudon delivers Nikki to the bus station the next morning, but Nikki becomes broken-hearted, realizing that she has to go back to Philadelphia, leaving Loudon, who is about to get married. While on the bus, she opens an envelope in the security box and finds the photographs that prove that Mr. Worthington is an embezzler and he was the mastermind behind the theft. Nikki gate-crashes the wedding, gets Mr. Worthington arrested and proclaims her love for Loudon. The film ends with Nikki and Loudon riding off into the sunset on a bus to Philadelphia, with Murray chasing after them.
Read more about this topic: Who's That Girl (1987 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)