Mulholland Falls Review by Beth Ann Gaynor

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Starring	Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Connelly, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Treat Williams, John Malkovich
Director	Lee Tamahori
Year	1996
What it's worth		Forget it (You'd have to pay me to see it again.)

The movie certainly has a promising premise. It's about four men in 1950s Los Angeles, detectives who are given license to do whatever they darned well please to keep the peace in the city, to answer to no one for their actions, and use any means they feel necessary to promote their brand of justice. What does a group like that do when they come to loggerheads with the US military, a group who has been doing pretty much the same thing a lot longer - and a lot better - than these guys?

Hoover (Nick Nolte) is the leader of this group. We know he's the leader because he drives the car, and in the opening scenes, he's the one to decide exactly what unpleasantness will befall a mafia bigshot who's thinking of setting up shop in town. The wiseguy's dealt with succinctly, and without visible repercussions from the mob, which was my first sign that something was wrong with this movie.

The only member of the group to express any philosophical reservations about the group's way of releasing anger is Coolidge (Chazz Palminteri), the guy who's learning about life via his psychiatrist and is provided with most of the laugh lines in the movie. The other two members, played by Chris Penn and Michael Madsen, are pretty much interchangeable.

This band of detective toughs finds a mystery to solve; a young woman (Jennifer Connelly) dead outside of town. She was involved with kinky films, an army general, and, previously, with Hoover. Some of the kinky films also, coincidentally, include footage from a top secret army base.

This mystery took about 30 seconds for me to solve. It's so obvious that I was amazed near the end to realize that the characters hadn't solved it long ago, too. So when a murder mystery has no mystery, what's left?

In this movie, what's left is a shell game. "Here we go, folks, sit back and watch. Here's a little sex, a little violence. A little more sex, a little more violence. Where's the story? Where'd it go? Aww, you were so close, we put it there a minute ago, but now we've moved it over here. Try again - a little sex, a little..."

Gratuitous. That was the word I had been trying to grab during the movie. When your murder mystery has no mystery, what you're left with is gratuitous. We do have some snappy dialogue, and we have an excellent cast doing their best to make their characters likeable, even Connelly as the dead woman who gets to be seen in quite a number of flashbacks. But without any real story except to watch the obvious suspects get paraded past, there isn't any reason to get involved with the dialogue and the characters.

Sex and violence aren't, inherently, bad things. I'd even bump my ranking of this movie up to 'Cable' for guys who appreciate Jennifer Connelly's looks; the footage of her and the army general gets shown twice just to make sure you didn't miss it the first time. But I found myself idly wondering what that noise was they used for breaking bones, since it didn't sound like most breaking bones I heard, and that's a pretty bad sign for how thin the movie is getting stretched.

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