well done thriller

Rating: 6/10 (20 September 2007)

This little suspense piece was pretty well done in two primary respects. First, Robin Williams again proves that he is better served playing dramatic roles than comedic ones. He's too busy trying to bring Mork from Ork to all his comedic roles. His dramatic performances are more disciplined and much more effective. The second was the tidy use of the metaphor of Detective Dormer's inability to sleep in the perpetual daylight of northern Alaska in the summertime. He becomes obsessed with keeping the light out of his room just as he was obsessed with keeping the light off of his improper behavior in LA. The parallelism between the quest to keep the light out of his room and to keep the dark chapter of his police career from being illuminated is at the same time subtle and obvious -- a very nice piece of film-making. Al Pacino is restrained and vulnerable as Detective Dormer, which is a nice departure from his more typical roles. This is not his best work, but he's still very, very good. Hilary Swank is convincing in her role as the eager and attentive Detective Burr. All that said, this story dragged along at times. I was never convinced that homicide detectives from LA would be dispatched to assist a small town Alaska police force in resolving a relatively run-of-the-mill homicide, especially when the detectives dispatched were deeply enough involved in an internal affairs investigation to be front page news. Three stellar performances (Pacino, Williams and Swank) and some beautiful scenery boost this film out of some slow-paced story telling.