Jason Freeland's 'Brown's Requiem', the second James Elroy novel attempted in it's entirety - does not survive the flight. As bland a by-the-numbers adaptation as they come - the film takes none of the liberties and adds none of the skilled compacting that made 'L.A. Confidential' such an entertaining and breathtaking picture.

    Not that I'm comparing the two.

    It's screenplay, almost completely a carbon copy of the book - with insecure hyper-speech in place of the darkly humorous hipster dialogue - manages to leave out the three-dimensional human characteristics of it's main character, PI Fritz Brown : namely, his steamy affair with the subject of his investigation, Jane Bakker (Selma Blair - way too young and bad at acting); and the drive of his relationship with his cousin Walter, seemingly his only family (though it seems at the end that it was a deeper attachment in an earlier cut of the film because Brown mourns like Walter was in every other scene. Walter appears in two scenes living, two dead. Editing room floor. Rookie mistake.)

    Not that I'm comparing the film and the book.

     There's some fine casting in this visually inept film. Everyone looks the part, but the setting seems to be the browned out fissure of some straight-to-video movie set, charred from the hellfire of it's place, gathering dust on the shelf. Michael Rooker works easily as Brown : believeable as the sweaty, down-on-his-luck type - utterly amoral and constantly doing nothing of real importance. But nevertheless, a smart detective. Brion James, in this posthumous performance, does a nice turn in the role equivalent to James Cromwell's in 'L.A. Confidential'. Like I say, the casting is superb.

     Finally, it's Elroy's choice to set the story in the seventies and Freeland's choice to set the film in the nineties that really clash. Elroy's novels are not meant to be here-and-now and never were (that's why the only one that's even close is set as an investigation into an event that took place in the fifties - 'My Dark Places', Elroy's investigation into his own mother's "murder"). Changing times shoots the film in the foot completely because even though it holds back on the references to the current era - it's still not the majesty Elroy intended : the blowback of police corruption and glamorous mob control that moved into a drug-addled world of racist dogmas and bad haircuts. And you can feel it, even if you haven't read the book that the worst thing in this utterly tiresome film is it's identity crisis : it's has no idea what it wants to mold itself into, so it copies the page and shoots for the drunken, pay-no-attention audience of the rental world.

I bet it played that way in the theater, too (for all of five minutes).