BEFORE: While I'm watching crime films, I'm also about halfway through "True Detective" On Demand, and I'm blown away. I only need to avoid spoilers for a few more days, so if you're current on the show PLEASE don't give anything away. If you haven't watched the show, I strongly recommend it - Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConnaughey are just killing it, and it's the most tense, riveting drama I've seen on TV since "Oz" and "The Sopranos" went off the air.
I suppose "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" have been getting the accolades, but I never picked up on those shows - my ban on AMC is still in effect. That's what you get for putting commercials in the middle of movies, which is a no-no in my book. I only resort to films with ads in emergencies.
Linking from "Get Carter", Mickey Rourke was also in the great "Sin City" with Carla Gugino.
THE PLOT: A shady police detective finds himself in the middle of a murder conspiracy at an important boxing match in an Atlantic City casino.
AFTER: So weird to see the Atlantic City boardwalk in a film, since I was just there about two weeks ago. The casino looked really familiar, even though the film was made over 15 years ago, so I had to look it up. Yeah, they filmed at the Trump Taj Mahal, and I was there.
They used to have a thing called "locked-room mysteries", they were these little stories where someone would be found dead in a locked room, with very little furniture, and no murder weapon visible. The most famous is probably the one about the hanged man who had nothing to stand on and no way to get his noose over the ceiling beam, with a puddle of water beneath him. If you learn to think outside the box, you can perhaps guess that the man stood on a block of ice to set the noose in place, and then hung himself as the ice melted.
This film sort of pitches itself as a similar mystery to solve, only the crime takes place in a boxing arena filled with 14,000 people, and lots of people see it happen, including the lead character, his best friend who's also a naval commander, and a couple of mystery women. The Secretary of Defense is shot, but how could this happen at a sporting event that presumably has high government security, in addition to casino security?
Clearly, there's more going on that first meets the eye. But as the truth gets revealed, in the rush to defy our expectactions the facts start to come out of left field. Going back to the locked-room mystery, it would be like finding out that the block of ice was put there by aliens who teleported in. Not only would that be strange, and unmotivated by the story so far, it would be so far-fetched as to almost be irrelevant.
There are also a few huge plotholes - for example, there's a hurricane raging outside, and in this case, wouldn't a sporting event on the New Jersey coast get postponed? You just wouldn't see 14,000 fans move forward with their plans to go to a boxing match during such severe weather - a lot of people would probably be afraid to venture out that night, so even if the promoters wanted to proceed, the reality of things would probably force them to reschedule. Heck, they cancelled the NYC Marathon after Hurricane Sandy, and that was scheduled for weeks later. They cancelled just because it would have looked unseemly to put city resources toward some event that wasn't connected to hurricane relief.
The trivia section on the IMDB tells me that the original ending was a special-effects sequence of a tidal wave destroying the casino, which sounds a bit more awesome (and would have been quite prescient, I think). This would also go a long way toward explaining why there was so much footage of weather reporters at the start of the film, they were setting up an ending that ended up getting scrapped. By comparison, the ending that they replaced it with seems very lackluster.
I also learned that the first 12 minutes of this film appear to be one long cut, which would be amazing...if it were true. It's not, it's several sequences cleverly edited together to appear to be one long take. Oddly enough, something very similar happened on the episode of "True Detective" I just watched - some amazing camera work in both instances, but upon re-watching, I can spot the tricks that covered up the cuts.
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Guarding Tess"), Gary Sinise (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead"), John Heard (last seen in "O"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" as well as HBO's "True Detective"), Stan Shaw (last seen in "Daylight"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Kick-Ass"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"), Mike Starr (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Tamara Tunie.
RATING: 5 out of 10 slot machines
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