I’ve been to Disneyworld on a handful of occasions in my life. When I was there I always loved the Haunted Mansion. I think I liked it as a kid because it was “scary lite.” I liked how it was scary was like without actually being scary. It was safe scary. Surface scary. Beneath the dark veneer it was all safe and bright. It’s a schtick that Disney has down pat. Managing to take something and give you the general idea behind it while making it completely removed from everything that makes “it”, well, it.
The Black Dahlia was like a Disney version of noir. It looked nice and shiny on the surface but lacked any of the depth and danger that makes noir, well, noir.
I’ll get this out of the way. I consider James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” to be one of the ten best books ever written. It was an incredible characterization of obsession and paranoia. And I can’t begin to tell you how it pains me to see such incredible source material squandered on such a miscast, poorly written, badly directed piece of crap as this movie.
The movie is very badly miscast. Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichart simply does not work. Bucky is supposed to be a man obsessed with finding the Dahlia’s killer so that he can save his partner from going off the deep end and avoid being tempted by his partners girlfriend. Hartnett chooses to play this incredibly comples character with all the subtlety and panache of a block of wood. It pains me to hate on something like this, but it really truly deserves it.
I won’t go on about how the script manages to be bereft of everything that made the book so moving and emotional or how a movie about “the black Dahlia” barely makes any mention of her for the first 40 minutes. It’ll just have to suffice to say that it was all I could to not pick up my Gameboy and play Zelda until the movie was over.
3/10
