Since I get HBO/CineMax free for 3 months, I'm trying to make the most of it by catching up on movies I missed when they were in the theaters. THE BLACK DAHLIA is one such movie. I've read about the case for years, so when Hollywood finally decided to make a film about it, I'd wanted to see it, but for some reason, never got to on the big screen.
Now I'm glad I didn't waste $20+ (ticket + popcorn + drink) on it.
While I like Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johannson, and Hilary Swank in some things, and a few Brian DePalma films, this was a waste of all their talents. Based on the book by James Ellroy, which was more a noir detective love-triangle with the Black Dahlia crime as backdrop than an actual telling of the Elizabeth Short murder investigation, the film doesn't even do the noir thing well - in fact it's a mish-mash of pieces of noir-like vignettes jammed together. Unlike LA CONFIDENTIAL, where I understood the chemistry between all the leads and cared about each, the characters here fell flat. I didn't really care who ended up with which girl or if any of them survived to the end of the picture.
When it opens, it starts by introducing the fictional characters Ellroy used to weave in and around the Black Dahlia case rather than using any actual detectives. Even that could have worked if they had been truly interesting, but they end up as 1950s caricatures from bad B pics. Then, when the body is finally discovered in the movie (and even shown in its gruesome state - at least they got that mostly right), the story veers back off onto the fictional love-triangle and uses made up movie tests of Elizabeth Short to try to show what kind of girl the movie needs her to be to justify the weird and strange tangents into fantasy it takes... (Kind of reminds me of PEARL HARBOR, another Josh Hartnett movie - one that takes a title that will 'sell', tells a wholly unrelated and fictional story for most of the 2-3 hours, pasting something historical into it - mostly at the end and badly - to try to justify the title used to lure moviegoers into parting with their pocket change...)
It's too bad Hollywood missed a great opportunity to find (and let) someone tell a more accurate and compelling story of Elizabeth Short's real life LA murder: the sheer number of suspects, the hundreds of investigators involved (not just the two the movie boiled it down to), the terror 1950s LA experienced wondering who might be next, the seedy corruption of the times, the evidence that would disappear making it hard to prove who knew and said what when, and the fact that to this day it remains unsolved (unlike the movie's made up ending).
This is one movie that WON'T go on my 'watch again and again' list and definitely will never be added to my DVD collection! In fact, it was so bad, that after watching it, I immediately deleted it from my DISH DVR so it wouldn't take up valuable space for a better movie, even with hundreds of hours of available time for recording... (I LOVE that the DISH DVR is allowing me to also record HBO/Cinemax so I don't have to try to stay up til all hours to watch these movies I originally missed. Even for free, I wouldn't have wanted to lose 2 hours of much-needed beauty sleep over THE BLACK DAHLIA! LOL)
(2006) Rated R for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and language
Starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johannson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Mia Kirshner
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