An Incoherent Mess

Rating: 1/10 (19 March 2007)

I am quite taken aback by the number of "rave" comments on this film that have been posted on IMDb.
Admittedly only having seen it on television, my opinions on the film would have been even worse had I paid good money to see it in a cinema. I found the whole enterprise an incoherent and empty - and flashy, i.e. typical Michael Mann - mess, compounded by the extreme difficulty of desperately trying to understand what all the characters were actually speaking, let alone trying to make heads or tails of any supposed but lacking clear story-line.
The whole point of literature, the cinema, the theatre, is to tell a story in a comprehensible manner. That usually means providing the reader/viewer with an account or a drama that has a beginning, a middle, and an end so that they may be provided with a clear understanding of what the account/drama/story is all about.
This film failed, miserably, in that basic element. Not once could the viewer obtain the least degree of understanding of what the real "story" was supposed to be about. Periodically, the name "Felix" was bandied about, and at the end you just about hear it in connection with the lady attorney and the case she was prosecuting. But then, what? Was any of that made clear at the beginning of the film, and indeed the connection between "Felix" and the detective who investigated the death of "Ramon"? Certainly not, which meant that throughout the viewer had to guess what was going on, a task made worse by the incomprehensibility of the soundtrack dialogue, a too depressing and common feature of much of modern-day American cinema.
Given all this, the viewer is left with the impression that the director's real purpose - rather than to tell a comprehensible story - was simply to present a series of flashy images as though he was shooting a television commercial.
And as to Jamie Foxx actually being nominated for an Oscar - what a joke! I thought his performance throughout was embarrassing in the extreme - amateurish and bad.
A poor show all round.