When his boss, friend and mentor Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) is killed shadowing some scary individuals, his fellow private dicks Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) are shocked but resigned Lionel is, however, convinced Frank was on the verge of blowing open a corrupt city hall conspiracy, involving the ethnic cleansing of black people from areas ripe for lucrative redevelopment. But Lionel is also blessed with a superb memory and is good at his job.
Norton plays Lionel Essrog, the detective with a tic that means he will convulsively yelp disjointed phrases, and jerk his head and grimace as if suddenly suppressing a huge yawn Norton fabricates these mannerisms with care. But perhaps this is the kind of spoof effect that Norton wanted to minimise. I regretted, in way, that Norton had not kept the original setting – watching this, I found myself remembering Rian Johnson’s Brick, a pastiche hard-boiled detective story set among modern-day high school students. There are plenty of beautiful, classic automobiles, cleaned and polished to a showroom gleam as such cars tend to be in the movies, and not dirty and scuffed-up the way they would be in real life. Whatever its flaws, it is a substantial and distinctive drama, unlike anything in the cinema right now, although obviously like a lot of the gumshoe movies of yesteryear, such as The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown, with an element of a municipal graft picture like All The King’s Men – and this film’s producer, Warner Brothers, has been renowned for precisely this kind of gritty, violent picture since Hollywood’s golden age.Īnd all this is partly because Norton has taken the decision to change the late 1990s setting of the original novel and backdate it to the 1950s.
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