MANHATTAN NIGHT (Brian DeCubellis). 113 minutes. Opens Friday (August 26). See listing. Rating: NN
The best noir films are as dry as their heroes the self-consciousness of Manhattan Night makes it awfully hard to appreciate the things it does well.
Brian DeCubellis’s adaptation of Colin Harrison’s 1996 novel Manhattan Nocturne is a contemporary take on a classic premise. World-weary newspaper columnist Porter Wren (Adrien Brody) is approached by a beautiful widow (Yvonne Strahovski) to investigate the mysterious death of her filmmaker husband (Campbell Scott, seen in flashbacks).
Naturally, nothing is what it seems, and before long our married hero is sleeping with his sultry source and being threatened by powerful men who want their secrets kept.
Nifty, right? But Manhattan Night is undermined by DeCubellis’s purplish presentation, which keeps drawing attention to itself.
Brody works hard to sell his character’s hard-boiled dialogue (and even more clichéd voice-over), but you can feel the strain. It also doesn’t help that DeCubellis has encouraged composer Joel Douek to drench every scene in portentousness.
