Disappointing, with irritating lapses

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2004)

Spoilers, but I tried to suppress them...
After all the hype, I finally watched it tonight, and found the story a bit disappointing and frequently unrealistic or plain impossible.
1. The worst offense was that blood type analysis and DNA analysis go hand in hand these days, and they turn up the victim's gender along with their blood type, but that didn't happen here, apparently.
2. The river as a routine "washing" solution also strikes me as ludicrously unlikely.
3. That a liquor store owner can somehow become viewed as a powerful "king" of the neighborhood also strikes me as dubious.
Maybe the book covered these somehow, but a film with gaps like these got me scratching my head too often, and not able to view the characters as genuine. Their idiosyncracies also got to me after a while (e.g., two characters who mostly don't speak, a "borderline" guy who goes quickly from too lucid to too fuzzy, and a mob boss-type character who looks and acts clean (but penitent), yet has crooks hanging around with him routinely.
Overall, it's a decent movie for character studies, and a nice place to see some favorite actors, but I say it's a bit of fluff that managed to warp a lot of people into making it to be something it just isn't.