Visual originality on good old fashioned film noir themes

Rating: 9/10 (23 September 2014)

It's hard to rate a movie that has its focus on style, rather than story, but still manages to use good plots with interesting rich characterization. Is it a perfect film or just a niche genre that cannibalizes comic books and dazzles us with nice visuals and huge stars?
For me it was a bit of both. I loved the visuals and I liked the noir theme, but then I am of a certain age; I grew up with stories like that. The indomitable males that can resort to violence as easily as they breathe and only need a fantasy woman to get into action are kind of an endangered species today, when every hero must obey the politically correct guidelines of the present and all the women must be more than good looking damsels in distress, but you can see how that way of thinking was the archetype of all the hero action movies in the last 50 years. It feels strange to see a 68 year old cop kissing the 19 year old girl who is truly in love with him. Today only Michael Douglas can pull that off, and only in a film that shows how pathetically misguided he is. And how strange it is to get those morally ambiguous endings when the hero wins and also loses. Fair trade?
I can only recommend watching this film. Even if it would have been worse, I would have still recommended it. The unique style, the modernized noir, the amazing cast. The only thing that I kind of disliked was that it is a mosaic film. There are actually three stories and one very short one. They kind of intersect, but only accidentally. Well, watch it.