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The Black Dahlia drips with film noir atmospherics as it unspools a lurid and complicated story taken from James Ellroy's true-crime-inspired novel of the same name. Two boxers-turned-cops--Lee "Mr. Fire" Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, Thank You For Smoking) and Bucky "Mr. Ice" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett, Black Hawk Down)--are morally tested as they pursue the killer of a young would-be actress, grappling with corruption, narcissism, stag films, and family madness along the way. L.A. Confidential turned Ellroy's heated prose into a taut, compelling movie, but The Black Dahlia collapses like a soggy meringue. Director Brian De Palma (who once made such vibrant, entertaining movies as Carrie and The Untouchables) can't muster the energy to craft one of his trademark bravura action sequences and seems outright bored by the more mundane tasks of shaping performances and establishing mood. The actors flounder; Eckhart seems to be emoting for two, perhaps to compensate for Hartnett's bland lack of affect; even actresses as dependable as Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation) and Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) give clumsy, unconvincing performances. The one exception is an unsettling performance by Mia Kirshner (Exotica) as the doomed actress, seen only in perverse screen tests and stag films. The story is incomprehensible (and when you can follow it, it's silly); the dialogue is atrocious; the characters make hardly any sense from scene to scene. The movie is, however, good for many moments of absurd camp, such as when Bucky enters the most lavish, palatial lesbian bar you'll ever see, featuring a Busby-Berkeley-style stairway of smooching babes and a crooning k.d. lang. --Bret Fetzer
| CATEGORY: | DVD |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 15 September, 2006 |
| MANUFACTURER: | Universal Studios |
| MPAA RATING: | R (Restricted) |
| FEATURES: | AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC |
| TYPE: | Drama, Feature Film-drama, Movie, Mystery / Suspense / Thriller |
| MEDIA: | DVD |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
| UPC: | 025192918025 |
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Customer Reviews of The Black Dahlia (Widescreen Edition)
Gorgeous But Not Gripping Okay, so Brian De Palma seems satisfied with his movie: he's glad that it's true to the source book and mirrors its "mosaic, non-linear" style; he's glad that it's not an overly viewer-friendly movie, as with some pride he pronounces it to be "a little more to digest than your average episode of CSI". What's more, the author of the source novel, James Ellroy, seems to be satisfied with the adaptation, too. The writer admits De Palma's take on the story "captures the violence and the elements of power", and then he goes on to praise the actors - especially Mia Kirshner and Josh Hartnett. But is The Black Dahlia as good as we all hoped? Or more precisely - is it as good as another adaptation of Ellroy's book, the famous L.A. Confidential? <
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>The short answer would be: hell no. It's not as gripping as L.A. Confidential and it doesn't have all these interesting, meaty characters. The Black Dahlia may be prettier than L.A. Confidential - it may be the year's prettiest movie, actually - but beauty is not all, not even if talk a De Palma film. In the past the director might have been successful in making some films that had the looks but didn't seem to have the brains, but they were either fruit of De Palma's love for the gratuitous B-movie style or proofs for his artistic independence - wild, unashamed pieces that he wrote and directed, putting all his love and energy in them. The Black Dahlia, on the other hand, is an uneasy compromise. De Palma decided to hide his style behind Ellroy's story - and it perhaps could have worked fine, had the story been a little more interesting and fresher than it is. <
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>The plot of The Black Dahlia doesn't hold many surprises for the viewer, and that's perhaps its greatest flaw. We're in Los Angeles, in the perfectly recreated 1940s, and we observe two handsome detectives, "Bucky" (Hartnett) and "Lee" (Eckhart), who investigate a brutal and puzzling murder of a young actress. They cover each other's back when there's some shooting involved, they watch the films and auditions the deceased has recorded, and they are in love with the same girl - the sexy and provocative but also sensitive and somewhat helpless Kay Lake (Johansson)... And here the problems begin. The love triangle - not much connected to the murder mystery - is much more interesting than the police investigation; the competition between the two detectives is, in fact, the heart of the movie, and whenever the plot steers away from this in favour of picking up the unclear hints and clues as to who killed the girl - our interest wanes. The Black Dahlia struggles to be a murder mystery but the murder itself is the least interesting thing in it. And it doesn't help that De Palma decided to abandon his trademark approach to filming violence (think the baseball bat scene in The Untouchables): what we get of it in The Black Dahlia seems restrained, saturated. Some viewers will be glad to know that the director did his best not to treat violence gratuitously this time around but, and I'm really sorry to announce this, it doesn't work well for The Black Dahlia's impact on the viewers. <
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>By no means, however, is The Black Dahlia a bad or even an average film. Several scenes are wonderful reminders of De Palma's visual genius (the boxing scene, the suspense before the shootout), the photography is mesmerising throughout, and the actors shine in a handsome, old-fashioned way (and not just Hartnett and Kirschner but also Eckhart who is convincingly wild in his role, Johansson who is unbearably sexy, and Swank - weird yet definitely attractive). If only the script were more surprising and the final revelation more shattering, The Black Dahlia could knock L.A. Confidential dead - but that's asking a lot, is it not?
Waste of plastic
This is one of the worst films I have ever seen.
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>The plot was confusing and the Black Dahlia played a VERY
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>small part in the story. The main issue was the cops. The
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>acting was mediocre and meaningless. The plastic used to
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>make the DVDs would better be served making keyholders.
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>Don't waste your time or money.
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Worst movie ever seen.
I wasted over two hours of my life on this VERY bad movie.