Mark Wahlberg stars as the improbable Billy Taggart, hard-boiled man of the streets and private eye – an ex-undercover cop who retired from the force after a shooting scandal (does this sound familiar yet?).
Now he cruises around the city like a Raymond Chandler character – in fact, exactly like Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, another ex-cop: tapping his buddies in the police for favours, stomping all over crime scenes while he spars verbally with the detectives, and sleeping nights in his crummy neon-lit office, where an ever-helpful but slightly bimbo-ish secretary fields calls from his creditors. (Do these sort of people even exist any more? Did they ever?)
So then Taggart gets this commission, see, from the crooked “Mayor of New Yaawk” (Russell Crowe), to follow the mayor’s beautiful wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and learn the identity of her adulterous lover.
Apparently Taggart doesn’t watch many old crime movies, or he would have seen this obvious set-up coming from across the horizon – so he takes the job, and, whaddya know, some schmuck gets whacked and he’s the fall guy.
In what appears to be a desperate attempt to inject something original into this wretchedly derivative tale, the resolution of the plot hinges on the wife’s suspicious conduct and what’s clearly implied as a gay affair between two minor characters.
But it’s the love that dare not speak its name, and the key relationship is never explained, unless you credit the mayor’s wife saying, archly: “we’re just good friends – can’t you understand that?”
Apart from this slightly coy plot-hole, the most baffling puzzle of this otherwise well-signposted mystery is the question of how it managed to attract such an A-list roster of stars.
Crowe and Wahlberg both give decent performances, and get to have more fun with their characters than Zeta-Jones, who only gets a few lines in the whole movie.
Unfortunately, none of them are enough to save this atavistic pulp-crime story dressed up as a modern thriller, which tries so hard to be noir but ends up a dull shade of gray.
Two stars (out of five)
Director:
Allen Hughes
Stars:
Mark Wahlberg
Russell Crowe
Catherine Zeta-Jones
Runs:
109 minutes