Marlowe: A Collection of Tropes

There was a period when there was a running joke on the internet where a person would feed an AI hundreds of hours of scripts from a certain genre and then force it to generate its own script with hilarious results. Marlowe feels like someone forced an AI to watch hundreds of hours of film noir movies and output its own without the comedic results. The reason for this is that the film uses all the tropes one would expect from a movie in this genre, however, the movie fails to understand why these things are important within the genre.

Marlowe follows private investigator Philip Marlowe (previously played by James Garner and Humphrey Bogart but played here by Liam Neeson) as he is hired to find the ex-lover of an heiress in 1930s Bay City, California. Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Daniela Melchior, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Alan Cumming also star.

The movie works well if someone is only looking for the look and feel of a 1930s film noir movie without paying much attention to narrative, plot, acting performances, or editing. The costume and production designers understood what they were going for and nailed the movie's aesthetic from beginning to end. That said, there really is not much more about the movie that works.

The biggest problem is that the film is a clear example of a filmmaker trying to do something in a dormant genre but not understanding the underlying reasons why tropes work in the material it is coming from. There’s the old adage that to break the rules, one must understand the rules otherwise it does not have the intended subverted effect which is entirely what happens within this movie. The movie does everything that one would expect from a film noir mystery, however, none of it lands as intended because the underlying story does not understand why these tropes work in the source material.

That is coupled with some of the worst acting from world-class actors since Movie 43 about a decade ago. Everyone is horrifically simultaneously overacting and underacting in a weird situation. The editing is also cumbersome with a lot of strange cuts and awkward transitions that make the movie not work on most levels.

If one really wants to see this movie, more power to them, however, there are certainly better uses for their time. This is not even an example of a “wait for streaming” experience, the movie is just entirely bad to a borderline unwatchable degree.

Final Rating: 3/10