This movie sounded good from the moment I heard about it, but after watching Snake Eyes again last week and reminding myself how much I love Brian De Palma, I wanted to love this movie even more. Sadly, this wasn’t to be. There are flickers of pure De Palma cinema here, one scene in particular that ends with Josh Hartnett being knocked out is awesome, but I can honestly think of “bad” De Palma movies that are better than this – the aforementioned Snake Eyes, Mission: Impossible, Raising Cain (I say “bad” – I personally think they’re brilliant but I know they’re not up there with Scarface, The Untouchables, Carrie, say).

Just as De Palma is infamous for paying ample homage to the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, here he’s clearly trying to do the same for noir cinema. The movie resembles mostly Chinatown and L.A Confidential but at no point betters either nor really embellishes the genre. To the same end, Mark Isham’s score resembles Jerry Goldsmith’s to those two movies. Though it’s mostly typically jazzy of the composer, in places it’s very different from the other Isham stuff I’ve heard, and along with the cinematography, costume and production design, it forms the only really great things about the picture.

It’s pretty to look at, but there’s really not a great deal of substance. If it’s pretty you want, I can recommend just about any other De Palma movie; if you want the noir, then, like I said, L.A. Confidential or Chinatown, or any of the zillion 40s productions that started the whole thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 4:43 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.