| Overall Grade: |
C- |
|
| Story: |
D |
|
|
| Acting: |
C- |
|
|
| Direction: |
D- |
|
|
| Visuals: |
B |
|
|
Disappointed...extremely.
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Feb 25, 2008
297
of
406 people found this review helpful
When I first heard a long while back about a movie about The Black Dahlia, I thought one of two things.
I thought that I was going to see either:
01. A movie about the murder case that I have been researching since I was 14 and that I had done two book reports on,
or...
02. A movie about Elizabeth Short herself in which she was a lead character.
Unfortunately, neither of the above were true. The Blach Dahlia is about anything but. It came off to me as a less than mediocre attempt at a crime drama, using the name only as publicity. The lead role, played by Josh Hartnett, is horribly overacted with the dialogue being utterly rambled and meaningless, which made the film hard to watch. Paired with his horrible narration that is nothing short of lame, drawn out, and confusing, the leading role was a step away from disastrous. Most of the rest of the cast is completely meaningless, and while the actress playing the role of Elizabeth Short looks the part, her acting is something not to be desired.
Sadly, of the 2 hours and 1 minute the movie lasted, The Black Dahlia, by name, or screen time, was only in the film a total of approximately 40 minutes. I don't know about you, but I find something wrong with that in a film called "The Black Dahlia".
Fortunately, the visuals were very appealing, the filming style and effects are executed beautifully. But you forget about that when trying to follow the go-nowhere dialogue and seemingly unexplained plot points. What you end up with is a bunch of meaningless details that apparently all lead up to something, but at the end of the movie, I sort of had that feeling you get when you've been screwed over.
What you get here is something along the lines of Titanic or Pearl Harbor... a tragic event portrayed as a love story, but at least in Pearl Harbor they had the attack and in Titanic the boat went underwater. What we have in this movie is a dead body whose character is not fully explained very well (and who just happens to carry the title of the movie) amongst a crime drama love story setting that resembles 50's movie mediocrity than it does what it was advertised as, a movie about what the title is about. |
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