Crime Spree?

So, on paper at least, the fall's been good for crime-themed movies… Hollywoodland, The Black Dahlia, The Departed… you'd think they were making cheap horror/splatter films, the way they're cranking them out. Of course, just because we had a rush on crime fiction, doesn't mean they're all any good. Hollywoodland I've already covered, so no sense going into it again here. But a week after Hollywoodland came The Black Dahlia, so I might as well start there.

I really wanted to like Dahlia. Based on a James Ellroy book, directed by Brian DePalma, starring Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johansson (and, oh yeah, Josh Harnett), what's not to like? It's got that LA Confidential vibe, with a director that knows the genre and a great cast… and let's not forget that very cool poster! (Of course, then I realized that the poster was a knock-off of Six Feet Under's first season cover, and it lost some of its glamour.)

Sadly, the results simply didn't live up to my expectations. Scarlett was good, and so was Eckhart, but the big surprise was Josh Harnett, who somehow managed to rise above being too damn pretty to turn in a very impressive performance. This is, by far, the best work I've seen from him. But it wasn't enough to save the movie for me.

The big problem, of course, is Ellroy's novels are amazingly complex, convoluted knots of storytelling that almost demand rereading and dissection and must be improbably difficult to turn into viable screenplays. They managed to pull it off with LA Confidential, but that was apparently at the expense of plot points and characters and a blending of storylines that purists find jarring. (I read the book after seeing the movie, so I had no preconceptions going into the movie and found the book easier to follow for having seen the movie. So I've got no complaints about how that one was adapted.) Dahlia, on the other hand, was more faithful to the book (in a recent article, Ellroy describes Dahlia as the "Catholic" version of one of his books, as opposed to the "Protestant" LA Confidential… a brilliant, if somewhat parochial, analogy.) Sadly, this leads to the story being more confusing and diffuse, with the viewer left wondering what the hell was going on with Eckart's Blanchard, and are the Linscott's really supposed to be comic relief, and leaves the Dahlia's story, the murder of Elizabeth Short, as only one piece of the film's puzzle.

Usually, I'm okay with a movie like this demanding repeated viewings to get it all straight. I've watched LA Confidential numerous times, and it took many to get all the connections nailed down. The difference here was that I wanted to do that with Confidential, and I enjoyed rewatching it each time. I have no such interest nor incentive with Dahlia. If I want to get the whole picture this time, I'll read the book.

Then came The Departed. Again, you've got a great director in Martin Scorcese and a cast that leads off with Jack Nicholson, then folds in Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Walberg, Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen. How can you go wrong?

Maybe that's ultimately my problem with the movie… my expectations were simply too high. I went in expecting to love this movie, and walked out only liking it. It's not that I think it's a bad movie… far from that! But I didn't walk out thinking "this is the best movie I've seen this year" or "This is finally Scorcese's Oscar." My thoughts on leaving the film were more along the line of "well, that was interesting." Talk about damned with faint praise.

I can't nail down why I was left so unimpressed. Maybe it's simply a lot of smaller things adding up to my reaction…
The pace was leisurely, at best. Not that taking one's time in setting up the film is necessarily a bad thing, but it just seemed like it took SO long for anything to really start happening. The ending left me flat (perhaps the most damning part of the problem). [And, YES, this would be the time for me to warn SPOILER ALERT!]. The ending is a definite bloodbath, with virtually every character in the movie getting theirs by the end. Perhaps I was looking for something where someone walked away from the carnage, or maybe something with a little less of a "deus ex machina" feel than when Wahlberg's character suddenly reappears after going missing halfway into the film. And finally, there's the characters themselves. I've heard comments that Jack kind of pulls you out of the movie at times, simply because he's become synonymous with his characters these days, and what he brings to the role is always, in some way, Jack. But he actually bothered me less than Wahlberg's Dignam, who seemed almost a caricature of the foul-mouthed, bullying squad leader. And DiCaprio and Damon seemed almost interchangeable, physically and character-wise, for at least the first part of the movie. Maybe that's intentional, since they're playing two sides of the same coin, but it was still distracting. I was left without any characters that I particularly cared about, so I was left wanting at the end of the film.Ironically, the crime thriller I ended liking the most this past month was one I caught on DVD, and one I'd dismissed when it came out earlier this year.

Lucky Number Slevin got mixed reviews, at best, and I just never got around to seeing it while it was in theaters six months ago. (Note to self: 'so-clever-it's-too-clever' may not necessarily be a bad thing.)

This one does kind of throw you in and leave you wondering what the hell is going on for the first part of the film. It's not until twenty minutes in that you get into something resembling sequential storytelling, and by the time you get to the end and everything starts wrapping up, you're in danger of forgetting the set-up that so confused you in the first place. But seriously, this is one of those movies where, if you pay a modicum of attention, it's all going to fall into place for you by the end, and you'll enjoy the ride to get there.

Again, there's a great cast here and yes, once again, Josh Hartnett surprised me by giving a really interesting performance (I notice that in both Slevin and Dahlia, they messed up his pretty boy good looks early on in the film. Perhaps to keep you from getting distracted from the acting). Whatever the case, he's very good here, and Morgan Freeman & Ben Kingsley elevate their mob bosses from mere movie gangsters to something more interesting and dramatic. Bruce Willis' hit man is the kind of performance he can probably do in his sleep, but was still effective and fun, and Lucy Liu plays against type as Hartnett's new nice girl girlfriend.

So surprisingly, with all the noir and cops & robbers gangster stuff going on this past couple of months, it was the Pulp Fiction wannabe with the most interesting and entertaining take on the whole crime fiction genre. Go figure.