Bleeding Heartless

Romeo Is Bleeding directed by Peter Medak starring Gary Oldman, Lena Olin and Juliette Lewis

With all the necessary trappings, "Romeo is Bleeding" should be quintessential film noir. It is instead a dark and muddled mess with little style and even less interest. Borrowing heavily from past Film noir in everything from plot to music to costuming, director Peter Medak ("Salome", "The Krays") crosses the line from paying homage to being simply unoriginal.

The movie's plot is the rehashed tale of the good cop gone bad. In this case, Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) is the Queens police sergeant who cannot resist the temptations of the underworld. Like a child at a candystore window, Jack, in doing surveillance work, has longingly spied on the blandly depicted lifestyles of the rich and infamous. Instead of trading in his badge for true mobster glory, Jack decides to be a mob informer by remaining on the force. The whereabouts of protected witnesses is big business as Jack begins working for Don Falcone (Roy Scheider).

And for the film's first half we watch Jack volley between his inexplicably loyal wife Natalie (Annabella Sciorra) and his submissive moll Sheri (Juliette Lewis), all the while wrestling with his conscience. Because the formula would not be complete without a furtive villain force, Medak is compelled to introduce Russian mobster Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin) into Jack's dysfunctional life. Fueled by lust and fear, Jack is either chasing or being chased by this femme fatale from hell.

The story's odd pacing does not refresh the already-tired plot. The movie either drags through long uneventful sequences or spurts with confusing fast-paced scenes. Jack narrates the film in voice-over and, like that all-too familiar friend who can never quite capture the excitement of a story in its retelling, he manages to bury a potentially interesting tale under unnecessary details and tangents. In addition, the setting is both murky and disconcertingly dark. Medak takes a literal approach to film noir everything is bathed in black. As a result, dialogue and activity are lost in the shadows.

What plagues the film most is its unbalanced treatment of character development. The eponymous Romeo is overdeveloped, while Mona and the other female roles are paper-thin. Jack is basically a greedy bastard primarily concerned with satiating his appetites. Through incessant and insufferably cliched voice-over introspection, however, Medak insists that Jack is a man of true depth. He is not, and he does not deserve all the attention paid to him.

Mona, however, is another story. As a larger than life she-devil, Olin plays her with wonderfully demonic wickedness. She brandishes a deranged laugh as well as she does a pistol. Unfortunately, Medak gives us no insight (aside form an out-of-left-field tale of her losing her virginity) into why she is indeed so bad. She is instead figure with pseudo-super powers and an inexplicable penchant for evil. That Olin must parade around in stiletto heels and garters only erodes her character's credibility even further.

Medak treats the other women in Jack's life with equal abandon. Both Sciorra's Natalie and Lewis' Sheri are intriguing, albeit abbreviated, performances. It is therefore disappointing to see their characters relegated to prop status, as both women only seem to appear so that they can later disappear.

With its trite plot and random character portrayals, "Romeo is Bleeding" is both an anemic thriller and a colorless black comedy.