BEFORE: Between everything going on, working both jobs and also trying to keep current on "Tournament of Champions" and "Spring Baking Championship", I've almost fallen behind on movies, which is not good with a vacation coming up. So the quick fix is to pull a double, watch a couple movies back-to-back, however I tried this and fell asleep halfway through the second film, which is just not going to help. Let me try again to knock this one out so I can get back on track.
Liam Neeson carries over again from "In the Land of Saints and Sinners".
THE PLOT: In late 1930's Bay City, a brooding, down on his luck detective is hired to find the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress.
AFTER: Well, they really don't make movies like this any more, and you have to figure there's probably a pretty good reason for that. We've all moved on from the pulpy hard-boiled detective stories that were written in the 1930's, just as we've moved on from Victorian romances and movies about the Civil War - oh, sure, every decade or so somebody tries to bring them back, but there's some law about diminishing returns. Every time they come back, fewer people are interested. They'd rather watch a series about apocalyptic zombie fungi or what happened to a bunch of teen girls who got stranded in the woods, and those are TV series, I know, but they're open-ended, they can each go on forever, or until people stop watching. But who needs a classic detective story these days, after they aired CSI: Cyber and NCIS: Sydney? This film even makes jokes about how outdated everything is, a cop loans the private eye a random gun and says, "If they ever start tracking the serial numbers on these things, we're in trouble." Ha ha, we're getting away with something but also we're in the past and we're dead now.
They tried to revive the classic Hollywood film about making Hollywood films with "Babylon", and that sure didn't work. "Babylon" was just "Singin' in the Rain" only three times longer and five times more gross. That's gross as in vomit and violence, not box office gross. Some genres are perhaps better left alone, as we didn't NEED another film about Hollywood figuring out how to add sound to movies and put theater organ players out of work all across the country. And so we probably didn't need a new movie about Raymond Chandler's famous private eye, Philip Marlowe. Over the years, he's been played in films by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum. Note that the character is of no fixed age or height, but that happened in the books too - Marlowe was as tall as he needed to be and looked like whatever you thought he looked like. (See also - James Bond.)
He obviously works in Los Angeles, being close to the film industry and all that in this film, but it's called "Bay City" here, which is a bit odd. Could the film company not afford the rights to the name of Los Angeles? I figure that one's probably free, so why not use it? San Francisco is more of a "Bay City" than L.A. is, so really, what gives? Really, there are a lot of questionable choices here, like when a character looks at Marlowe's face and comments that he looks like he's been roughed up, however I didn't notice a bruise or a cut or any kind of damage at all, so again, WTF? Was it the make-up person's day off, or did they figure they would add the cuts or bruises in post-production, and then just never got around to that?
The story concerns Mrs. Cavendish, an heiress, the daughter of an aging film star, who hires Marlowe to find her boyfriend, Nico Peterson. A little digging and he finds out Nico Peterson's been run over by a car and is dead, so that should explain why he hasn't been showing up at his married lover's house. But when he checks in with Mrs. Cavendish, she says, "Oh, I know he's been reported dead. But I saw him in Mexico, so I think somebody faked his death." So now Marlowe's got to go BACK to the Corbata Club again and start asking a whole new round of questions. There's a LOT of going back and forth here, between the film's four or five locations, it really would be a lot more efficient if people were more forthcoming when they spoke with the detective, it would save a lot of gas and time.
For that matter, the film keeps going over the same plot points, again and again, so it's a long time before any real progress is made in this investigation. Every question Marlowe asks basically gets asked three times, in three different locations, again, lots of commuting between them, and then any major plot point is hammered home at least FIVE times. Yes, we get it, that guy deals drugs, he's said that several times, and it's been explained to everyone he meets. Nico goes to Mexico, yes, we get it, please stop mansplaining drug dealing to me. Hollywood stars like heroin, sure, we get it, but someday it will be cocaine and these conversations will all happen a lot faster, hopefully.
Marlowe finally tracks down Nico's sister, who hangs out at one club, but she can't talk freely there, so she wants Marlowe to meet her at ANOTHER club, where she works on Tuesdays. Great, more commuting, more mileage on the car, more time wasted before anybody can answer a question being asked for the third time. So he goes to the Cabana Club on Tuesday, but is met with a couple of toughs that try to beat him up, because the owner of the Corbata Club saw him talking with Nico's sister, so really, you won't see her again.
Then Mrs. Cavendish's mother, the aging starlet, wants to hire Marlowe to find the SAME guy he's already looking for, but for entirely different reasons. So she has to go over every single plot point AGAIN, but from her P.O.V. and explain why SHE needs to find this guy, who people think is dead but really he might not be dead. OH MY GOD and she has to explain exactly how she wants her tea made IN DETAIL to the waiter, who probably doesn't even speak English. Can't anybody just SHUT UP in this movie and stop explaining everything from tea brewing to drug dealing to how guns aren't being tracked yet?
Finally something happens when Marlowe gets too close to getting some questions answered, they slip some drugs into his drink and drag him through the THIRD illicit club and lock him in a room while they torture the drug dealer and force him to explain yet again how famous people love drugs and how they need to be smuggled into the country. Yeah, dude, we know this already, because it's literally all you ever talk about. Ah, but Marlowe was only pretending to be drugged, so now he can break free, and also he knows who the real villain mastermind is, and it's exactly the person you thought it would be, the guy who plays the villain in really every film he's been in over the last decade. You really don't hire that actor for any other reason, like I think he would never get hired to play a normal guy with a wife and kids who worked at a shoe store or something, because nobody would ever believe him in that role. Typecasting is great, because you can just skip to the end of the movie now and save yourself some time, because, duh, it was that guy.
After all that, the guy Marlowe's been looking for turns up at his own house, which sure could have saved us all some time if he'd just done that sooner. He tries to explain why he faked his own death, but by now it doesn't really matter, anyway it also falls back on the same points that the film has made over and over - famous people are rich, they like to take drugs, and somebody had to bring the drugs to them, because that's how drug dealing works. Sure, mansplain it again. But then he maybe learned the hard way that keeping extensive notes about all that was probably not such a great idea.
Ugh, this was so tedious but at least when it's over you'll be glad for that. I don't know, maybe you'll feel nostalgic for a time when drugs were illegal and also you could smoke in a restaurant and also Nazis were about to try to take over the world. Or maybe not.
Directed by Neil Jordan (director of "Mona Lisa" and "The Crying Game")
Also starring Diane Kruger (last seen in "The 355"), Jessica Lange (last seen in "In Secret"), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "Faster"), Colm Meaney (also carrying over from "IN the Land of Saints and Sinners"), Daniella Melchior (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Alan Cumming (last seen in "Loser"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Birth"), Seana Kerslake, Francois Arnaud, Ian Hart (last seen in "Tristram Shandy"), Patrick Muldoon, Mitchell Mullen (last seen in "Filth"), Brenda Rawn, Alan Moloney, Stella Stocker (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Darrell D'Silva (last seen in "Dirty Pretty Things"), Kim DeLonghi, Tony Corvillo, Roberto Peralta, J.M. Macia, Michael Garvey, David Lifschitz (last seen in "The Promise"), Anton Antoniadis, Minnie Marx, Luke Manning, Mark Schardan (last seen in "The Gunman"), Billy Jeffries, Gary Anthony Stennette (last seen in "Paradise Hills"), Julius Cotter (ditto), Michael Strelow, Lauren O'Leary, Keith Gallagher
RATING: 4 out of 10 studio lot parking spaces
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