The Singing Detective

SINOPSIS

Dennis Potter's excellent 1980s amalgam of psychological drama, detective thriller and musical fantasy gets hung, drawn and quartered by this ill-advised Hollywood remake. Replacing Michael Gambon as the bitter, psoriasis-afflicted writer, Robert Downey Jr overplays every scene, with his skin make-up as heavy-handed as the name change from Philip Marlow to Dan Dark. Truncating the key childhood flashback scenes into almost nothing, the film is more interested in sterile musical numbers (that are largely embarrassing) and sleazy film noir fragments that play like some bad David Lynch imitation. Director Keith Gordon has talented actors in almost every role - Jon Polito and Adrien Brody as hoods, Jeremy Northam as Dark's fictional protagonist, Robin Wright Penn as his wife - yet all are somehow unconvincing. Aside from some striking, if theatrical, lighting, the only plus point is Mel Gibson's cameo as Downey Jr's bald hospital psychiatrist, whose joint rendition of Three Steps to Heaven is the only sequence that captures the essence of Potter's original work.