You could say Neil Jordan has gone down in the world. This neo-noir based, not on a Raymond Chandler novel but on John Banville's more recent take "The Black-Eyed Blonde", is a very poor addition to the genre, handsomely shot by Xavi Gimenez to resemble Edward Hopper paintings but totally lacking in thrills or atmosphere and surprisingly badly acted.
An over-the-hill Liam Neeson plays an over-the-hill "Marlowe", (that's the title but in this day and age that name in itself is unlikely to draw in an audience; a dear friend of mine actually thought it might be a biopic of Christopher Marlowe). For the uninitated he's the same Philip Marlowe who's been played by Mitchum, Garner, Gould, Dick Powell and both Montgomery's, Robert and George and of course most famously by Bogie but Neeson's Marlowe is instantly forgettable.
He's been hired by femme fatale Diane Kruger to find her lover who's disappeared. It's the same old schtick movies like this thrive on but here the tortuous and convoluted plot feels like a pale imitation of the real thing as if someone came up with the idea of let's make it more baffling than "The Big Sleep". Jessica Lange, far from her best, is Kruger's mother but it's left to Danny Huston, now almost a dead ringer for his father, to breathe a brief modicum of life into proceedings. Unfortunately, some smart one-liners aside, the movie was dead before it started.
No comments:
Post a Comment