John Greene, a washed up private detective, gets a new intern in his office, Tim, and explains him the bad sides of the job. Luckily, a new client shows up: she is Natalie, who asks Greene to find out who is following her. Greene tracks down her stalker, Hodges, and through him finds his boss, the rich Bradford Guinness. Greene feigns he is willing to spy on Natalie, but Guinness rejects him. Still, Greene visits him again and asks why he is following Natalie. Guinness admits he wanted to recruit her for his shady business of camgirls, intending to bring back virtual brothels and the mob back in Chicago. Greene had the conversation recorded and talks with Natalie and Tim about trying to find a lawyer to sue Guinness.
Serge Bodnarchuk's feature length debut is an amusing independent movie in the vein of film noirs such as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep", and thus it is easily identifiable that the main actor Matthew K. Lane is trying to conjure up the "frequency" of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, though with a stronger emphasis on the comical side. At times, Bodnarchuk demonstrates that he has inspiration, whether it is in elegant visual ideas (for instance, the aesthetically pleasant opening scenes: the camera pans over a table, and all of a sudden the main protagonist, Greene, "stands up" into the frame, in tune to the credit "Matthew K. Lane" showing up on the screen), clever observations (at a bar, Greene points out to Tim that a couple at the table wears two different wedding rings on their fingers, deducting that they must be having an affair) or shrill dialogues ("Thank God for the Hindenburg, or else that would have been the worst idea in human history!", says the cynical Greene after hearing a crazy proposal on his phone). Sadly, the story starts losing energy and steam in the second half, which is too often marred on routine dialogues, when the boring lines start slowly replacing the good ones. A good deal of these could have been either cut or written in a more interesting way, whereas it is a pity that the main heroine, Natalie, does not have that much to do or place to shine in the story, leaving her a too passive of a character for a female lead. Throughout the film, Greene is trying to find out one thing: why is Natalie being followed by Guinness? The resolution is disappointingly anti-climatic, illogical and silly. However, Guinness is at times a fascinating bad guy, a person who actually has reasons why he is a villain, set as a metaphor for the greed in corporate world, whereas at least two of his lines—the Tunnel-Perspective-Vortex comment from the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the rare historical footnote from the Battle of Ramla (1102) in which the Muslims defeated the Christians, but one Crusader, Conrad, was so undefeatable and killed everyone that they had to allow him to be peacefully evacuated—are so deliciously written that not even Tarantino or Chayefsky would have been ashamed of them.
Grade:++
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