Marlowe

It was a boring Sunday afternoon (can't remember which one) when an unusual prospect came my way. One of the all-time greatest pulp detectives, Phillip Marlowe, created by Raymond Chandler and contemporary of Sam Spade, was making his cinematic comeback. The catch was that rather than adapt a Chandler original, director Neil Jordan and his co-writer, William Monahan, adapted a licensed novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black. It's an interesting prospect ...

Unlike the movie.

As usual, the titular Marlowe (Liam Neeson) gets his case from a dame. She is Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), heiress, on the trail of her missing lover. The guy, Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud), turns up as roadkill outside a local nightclub. But she protests that he's still around. Marlowe goes on the trail and finds himself a web of lies. Caught in that web are Clare's mother, Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange), Peterson's sister Lynn (Daniela Melechor), a shady mobster or two (Danny Huston's evil nighclub owner Floyd Hanson and Alan Cumming's flamboyant Lou Hendricks) and a plaster mermaid. 

What do I make of it? 

For starters, Neeson is theoretically fine as Marlowe. I haven't read up on Marlowe or seen his prior films, but the star is fine as a grizzled private eye. The script, however, is verifiably meh. It's a jumbled mess of exposition that will leave you confounded more than shocked. Things like a love triangle between Clare, Dorothy and some dude named "The Ambassador" fall flatter than Marlowe's feet. Nico really being alive isn't as earthshattering as it thinks it is. Neither the film nor its characters care who the actual murdered man is. Marlowe getting drugged and carried to a torture chamber could have worked ... had we not seen a genre-savvy Marlowe pour out his spiked drink straight away. Instead, it was a waste of time. Still, Clare being so much a femme fatale is also theoretically surprising.

What about the supporting cast? The biggest supporting standouts were Cumming as Hendricks and Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje as his tommy-gun toting chauffer, Cedric. Kruger and Lange are fine as the scheming mother-daughter duo of Clare and Dorothy, some writing issues aside. But a few names like that of the police chief are forgettable. Not even Nico, the man behind the mystery, makes a lasting impression. So, what will you remember the most?

It's that the film looks good. John Beard's production design transforms Dublin and Barcelona into 1939 Los Angeles rather well. One particular highlight is the neon-lit nightclub, which wouldn't look out of place in Dick Tracy. Marlowe himself nearly completes the look, sans the hat, when he dons a trench coat and infiltrates the nightclub. Betsy Heimann designed that and everyone else's wardrobe here. Despite my complaints about the prolonged torture chamber trek, it is still perfectly surreal as shot by cinematographer Xavi Gimenez. On the downside, the editing falls apart in the fight scenes; the first one is a non-starter, and the others are quick-cut jumbles. At least there's also a good score by David Holmes to listen to here.

This new take on Marlowe is an occasionally interesting revival of a classic gumshoe. Its impressive visual design is paired with a flat and confounding story with two accidental fake-out endings. It's ironic considering Quincannon's sage advice of knowing when to fold 'em. In this case, I think it's the presentation that did them in. Still, it's not a loss if it gets you interested in Marlowe's previous adventures. Maybe those will tell you better than this film why he's a compelling character after all these years.