This is a modern version of the classic noir detective tales narrated in the first person. As the movie opens we see a Greek cliff climber fall 100 feet to his death. The perfunctory investigation rules it an accident, which seems to conform with what we have seen, but the sister-in-law of the dead climber does not agree. She hires a run-down private investigator to take a closer look at the case.
SPOILERS follow:
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This is not a horrible spoiler, but it does give away a little more than a review normally does.
I watched it. The locales on Crete are beautiful and exotic, and Joseph Gordon Levitt does a good enough job in the Mitchum-Bogart role, but there is a logic flaw in the plot. Things could only work out for the sister-in-law if she engaged a private eye who was brilliant and brave enough to uncover the master scheme by penetrating all the secrets of a well-insulated rich family with mob connections. But according to the detective’s genre-obligatory “soliloquy in which he explains the plot,” she specifically hired him because he was a drunken stumblebum. That makes no sense. If he had truly been a useless alkie, she could not have gotten the resolution she desired.
That’s really a minor quibble. If you just ignore the fact that he said that, the plot is reasonably tight, although some characters are cardboard cut-outs that are there merely for plot exposition, in that they die or disappear without either satisfactory resolution or even any comment on their fates. There is, for example, a shoot-out in which both a cop and the local mafioso are killed, but nobody seems to acknowledge it.
I probably should have at least gotten close to the solution of the murder mystery, given the obvious genre cliche inherent in the set-up (there are identical twins – thus breaking Scoopy’s 21st unity), but I really didn’t, so that delivered one of the guilty pleasures that we seek from a detective film.
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