Poor script, mediocre acting characterize dull whodunit

September 18, 2006 —

Several years ago, I started watching Gosford Park at home. I had picked up the DVD on a whim, based on its critical praise and the fact that it was an old-fashioned murder mystery. I got about twenty minutes into the film and decided to shut it off. It was exceedingly boring and did nothing for me. Months later, I figured I had better watch it in its entirety - I had shelled out $19.99 plus tax to own it, after all. Come to find out, I really liked Gosford Park.

For this reason, I remained positive when Black Dahlia started out slow. This movie, which I had waited months for, certainly couldn't end up a major disappointment - could it? Unfortunately, an hour into Black Dahlia, I knew there was no hope for this movie adaptation of an intriguing true story.

For those who don't know, the Black Dahlia was the name given to Elizabeth Short, a 22 year-old girl who was found brutally murdered in California in 1947. Director Brian De Palma attempts to bring the real life events surrounding Short's death to the big screen with the same suavity that he did for Prohibition-era Chicago and Al Capone in The Untouchables.

Unfortunately, he had to try doing so with only Josh Hartnett and a terrible script to work with. Hartnett, while he holds his own, is not deserving of so much screen time in a movie like this. But that's the problem with Black Dahlia - it ended up as "a movie like this."

With such an interesting story to work with, De Palma foolishly puts all the focus on the detectives. Whoops. Perhaps someone should issue an apology for wasting millions of dollars and a hell of a murder mystery.

At least with Hollywoodland, the other based-on-actual-events murder mystery of the season, Allen Coulter and writer Paul Bernbaum follow the investigation as well as the final days of the victim.

Black Dahlia doesn't care about the girl for whom the movie is made. She spends more time on screen as a corpse than she does as a character vital to the plot.

Black Dahlia's main fault is that any mystery surrounding the real life events is lost within this movie. One quickly realizes that this is a movie about a detective who seems to be genuinely indifferent at times when it comes to solving the case.

And while De Palma's revival of detective noir is admirable, it just doesn't work very well because, honestly, it's all quite boring.

The film takes itself too seriously, aside from two embarrassingly silly scenes involving a wealthy suspect and her family, which were literally painful to watch as I banged my head repeatedly upon the back of my seat hoping the movie reel would burst into flames or some other miracle would save me from this torture.

The final straw is that, within the final twenty minutes, the movie attempts to resolve everything by revealing one shocking connection after another until there are more mysteries solved than were even presented over the course of the previous hour and forty minutes. Basically, unless I missed something while I was checking my watch every three minutes, this is just one big, boring, confusing mess.

At least when Gosford Park revealed whodunit, I cared enough to say, "A-ha!”