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What's wrong with Black Dahlia?

Posted by sjb (A) on September 15, 2006 at 08:40:07

Now I haven't seen it but it wasn't to hard to guess that this might be the problem (if there was/is one)...

From the LA Weekly review...

"Now for the bad news: Despite its title, The Black Dahlia is less about Short (very well played by Canadian actress Mia Kirshner, who appears only in flashbacks) than about how her death spurs a crisis in the lives of two LAPD officers and the beautiful-but-dangerous woman who comes between them. It’s essentially the same formula Ellroy deployed to fine effect in L.A. Confidential, where a similar romantic triangle foregrounded another sprawling mystery story. Only here, instead of Guy Pearce or Russell Crowe, we get Josh Hartnett — in what ranks as one of the most head-scratching casting boondoggles since John Wayne played Genghis Khan — as Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a quiet “good cop” who finds himself partnered on the Dahlia case with the boisterous, devil-may-care detective Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). When Bucky starts falling for Lee’s live-in girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), Blanchard scarcely notices, so consumed — for reasons the movie never makes clear — has he become by the search for Short’s killer.

No matter the offscreen sparks that reportedly flew between Hartnett and Johansson, we scarcely believe Bucky as a rival for Kay’s affections, because the mumbly, terminally boyish Hartnett is so wholly unconvincing as a grown-up — let alone a rough-and-tumble 1940s prole — that he’s like an acting student who stumbled into a costume warehouse and thought it would be cool to dress up as Sam Spade for a while. And when he has to deliver one of Ellroy’s hard-boiled lines, like “Who are these people who feed on others?” it’s downright laughable. Nor is Johansson (despite still looking like sex incarnate) particularly better, delivering all her dialogue in the same breathy-voiced huff and seeming a far less fatale femme than she did in Woody Allen’s Match Point. Their scenes together grind The Black Dahlia to a halt in a way that all the brilliant stylistic touches in the world can’t reverse."

"Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. " T.S. Eliot

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