The Frame

One of these days I’m going to a) start trusting Netflix’s estimated star ratings for me (they guessed I’d rate this two stars) and also b) remember that Josh Hartnett usually chooses terrible movies to be in. Again, a movie about a notorious unsolved Hollywood murder sounds intriguing. Even the way the film ends up focusing on the detective and how the investigation affects him could be a good movie–after all, that’s basically what Zodiac did. But The Black Dahlia is, if anything, a third-rate imitation of Zodiac (not really, since it came out earlier), using the brutal murder merely as a jumping-off point to a perverse and stupid and overlong story. I’m starting to expect this sort of thing from Hartnett, but Hilary Swank is usually smarter than this. And director Brian DePalma always tends toward the overly violent, but this beneath him…he’s capable of much better (cf. The Untouchables).
Well Below Average