Slow Burn
Assistant DA Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock) kills a man called Isaac Duperde (Mekhi Phifer). She claims it was in self defence after he stalked her and broke into her home to rape her. She tells her story to the DA, Ford Cole (Ray Liotta)...
Movie:
Assistant DA Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock) kills a man called Isaac Duperde (Mekhi Phifer). She claims it was in self defence after he stalked her and broke into her home to rape her. She tells her story to the DA, Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) who is running for Mayor. Cole is trying to figure out how he can keep this quiet when Luther Pinks (LL Cool J) walks into the police station with a different story that conflicts with Timmer’s.
Convinced that there maybe something in Pinks story he presses Timmer for the truth and spends the rest of the film struggling to put together the facts, although he is certain that it is something to do with a guy called Danny Luden. Luden is a mysterious gang leader of Kaiser Soeze-esqe proportions and someone who Ford has been trying to nail for years. Thrown into the mix with this storyline, we have a gas leak, a downtown urban development program, race issues and almost every character in the film being shown in such a way that we never truly know who is who they say they are which amounts to a confusing, although I would not say an entirely un-enjoyable, mess.
My main gripe about the movie, apart from the fact that massive chunks of the film are taken straight from the Usual Suspects, is that there is too much going on in terms of twists and turns. Almost every character is shown as having either a ulterior motive or another side to them that is not immediately apparent and whilst that is good to a certain degree there are just too many characters portrayed that way for it to be convincing. Although that is not to say that the acting is poor as it isn’t, Liotta gives a convincing if not standard performance as Mayor hopeful Ford.
Although I would be interested to find out if a DA in the US actually gets involved to the level that Ford does in individual cases. Blalock is easy on the eye and looks great especially when minus her clothes although again I would question whether her portrayal as an assistant DA is true to the actual job. I would assume that someone in her position would need to be professional and fairly conservative and hanging round in suspect parts of town and getting her hair corn rolled would be out of character for a real assistant DA, although this maybe how it is in the US and it’s just my lack of knowledge of the country and its practises that makes this seem a little unrealistic to me, perhaps someone from the US can comment on this.
LL Cool J is given some crazy dialogue with his character connecting everything and everyone by smell, particularly food smells, with the interrogation room smelling like burnt pot roast and Timmer smelling like everything from grapefruit to mashed potato. Apart from the crazy lines he doesn’t really have much to do except sit there feeding Ford various bits of information which push the story in small increments. Mekhi Phifer is either the dead guy, rapist or victim depending on whose flashback or point of view we are looking at, he is solid in his role and I must admit I like the actor after seeing him in 8 mile. Other supporting actors are Taye Diggs as Jeffrey Sykes and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Ty Trippin both of whom also seem to be more than they appear to be.
Slow Burn is Wayne Beach’s directorial debut, he also wrote the story and Screenplay, and I cannot help thinking that he bit off a little more than he can chew. His other two movie credits are as a writer and screenplay writer on Murder at 1600 and the Art of War respectively, both of which are very average films which I guess is why Slow Burn has turned out to be a very average thriller that tries to be a little more clever than it actually is, trying to pull in other issues such as race, with a fair amount of time devoted to questioning Timmer’s background particularly if she is of black decent or maybe even Mediterranean. Perhaps this ties into the fact that Danny Luden is so elusive and yet maybe in plain sight as we are introduced to chameleons and there ability to blend into their surroundings, but all this seems clunky and clumsy.
Extras:
There were no extras on this review disk.
Overall:
A slow, complicated thriller that copies the Usual Suspects, but is not as actually good as the 1995 classic. It's a bit messy in its execution although not a complete lemon.
For those that have not seen the usual suspects, the stories are similar in the following ways. In the Usual Suspects there is a mysterious criminal with the fantastic name of Keyser Söze, in Slow Burn that person is called Danny Ludden. The identity of this person is a mystery and through both films you are wondering which character is the evasive criminal. The stories are therefore similar in that it is a recollection based story involving flashbacks. Slow Burn is not a direct copy of the Usual Suspects, but there are enough details to see that it has been copied to some degree.
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