This is a very silly film.
Denzel Washington has obviously reached that tiresome but inevitable point in a glittering career where he wants to stretch himself as an actor. "He's a cop, and he's in a WHEELCHAIR!" was, I guess, the original pitch - an echo back to "Ironside", if you will - only Washington evidently vetoed this on the grounds that being quadriplegic wasn't quite disabled enough.
"Wheelchair-bound cops are ten a penny," he probably told his agent. "I want to be bed-ridden, on the verge of merciful euthanasia and only able to communicate with wistful eye-rolling and the occasional dignified grunt. Who needs to be an action hero? I'll win the Oscar through facial expressions alone."
His character is Lincoln Rhyme, a genius crime-scene investigator crippled by a falling girder but retained by the police as a consultant due to his encyclopaedic knowledge of all New York's grizzly murders.
And when a devious serial killer with a penchant for mutilation and historical copycatting runs amok, rookie cop Angelina Jolie (forensics experience: zero) is brought in to act as Rhyme's eyes and ears, before those pesky professional crime scene teams get in there and contaminate the evidence. Meanwhile, much of the New York Police Department ups sticks and relocates to Denzel's bedroom.
At this point, all plausibility has officially left the building. Washington smooth-talks Jolie into a little light amateur amputation, along with several other flagrant breaches of forensics protocol. I can't claim to be an expert, but I've seen enough CSI to know that William Petersen et al would not tolerate an uninitiated beat cop zooming in and cutting up their corpses, before they've had time to seal off the area, remove their aviator shades and stare quizzically into the middle distance.
Hey ho.
Jolie is almost as constricted in her role as Washington is in his, shorn, as she is, of any kind of sexuality. Indeed, she spends most of her time covered up in either clunky body armour or an unflattering blue boiler suit with only those famous bee-stung lips betraying any hint of trademark glamour. Her modest appearance would make sense if the institutionalised sexism storyline (implied by the early quips at Jolie's unsuitability for the case and the barefaced recruitment of Michael Rooker as the brash police captain) was fully thought through, but the director (Phillip Noyce) seems reluctant to make it an issue, so the rest of an impressive male cast (including Ed O'Brien, Mike McGlone and the genius Luis Guizman) are frustratingly underused.
Surprisingly, what little empathy there is, comes from Queen Latifah's no-nonsense nursemaid who dabs Washington's brow tenderly and provides pithy asides to the masculine posturing of the police officers.
Any Se7en-influenced cleverness accumulated during the intricately planned trail of clues at the murder scenes, is immediately ruined by a shockingly lazy ending, and, though Washington manages a melancholic smile during final fade-out, all dreams of Oscar-winning pathos have been long since banished.
5/10
Denzel Washington has obviously reached that tiresome but inevitable point in a glittering career where he wants to stretch himself as an actor. "He's a cop, and he's in a WHEELCHAIR!" was, I guess, the original pitch - an echo back to "Ironside", if you will - only Washington evidently vetoed this on the grounds that being quadriplegic wasn't quite disabled enough.
"Wheelchair-bound cops are ten a penny," he probably told his agent. "I want to be bed-ridden, on the verge of merciful euthanasia and only able to communicate with wistful eye-rolling and the occasional dignified grunt. Who needs to be an action hero? I'll win the Oscar through facial expressions alone."
His character is Lincoln Rhyme, a genius crime-scene investigator crippled by a falling girder but retained by the police as a consultant due to his encyclopaedic knowledge of all New York's grizzly murders.
And when a devious serial killer with a penchant for mutilation and historical copycatting runs amok, rookie cop Angelina Jolie (forensics experience: zero) is brought in to act as Rhyme's eyes and ears, before those pesky professional crime scene teams get in there and contaminate the evidence. Meanwhile, much of the New York Police Department ups sticks and relocates to Denzel's bedroom.
At this point, all plausibility has officially left the building. Washington smooth-talks Jolie into a little light amateur amputation, along with several other flagrant breaches of forensics protocol. I can't claim to be an expert, but I've seen enough CSI to know that William Petersen et al would not tolerate an uninitiated beat cop zooming in and cutting up their corpses, before they've had time to seal off the area, remove their aviator shades and stare quizzically into the middle distance.
Hey ho.
Jolie is almost as constricted in her role as Washington is in his, shorn, as she is, of any kind of sexuality. Indeed, she spends most of her time covered up in either clunky body armour or an unflattering blue boiler suit with only those famous bee-stung lips betraying any hint of trademark glamour. Her modest appearance would make sense if the institutionalised sexism storyline (implied by the early quips at Jolie's unsuitability for the case and the barefaced recruitment of Michael Rooker as the brash police captain) was fully thought through, but the director (Phillip Noyce) seems reluctant to make it an issue, so the rest of an impressive male cast (including Ed O'Brien, Mike McGlone and the genius Luis Guizman) are frustratingly underused.
Surprisingly, what little empathy there is, comes from Queen Latifah's no-nonsense nursemaid who dabs Washington's brow tenderly and provides pithy asides to the masculine posturing of the police officers.
Any Se7en-influenced cleverness accumulated during the intricately planned trail of clues at the murder scenes, is immediately ruined by a shockingly lazy ending, and, though Washington manages a melancholic smile during final fade-out, all dreams of Oscar-winning pathos have been long since banished.
5/10