After what seems like a decade in the making, Brian DePalma’s hard-boiled thriller The Black Dahlia is finally making its way to theaters. Let’s hope the lengthy delay is not an indication of the film’s quality (maybe you saw DePalma’s Mission to Mars or Snake Eyes).
The movie stars Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett as LA detectives investigating one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in history, the grisly 1947 murder of actress Elizabeth Short. The movie also stars bosomy beauty Scarlett Johansson and toothsome Hilary Swank (who previously spent some time with Eckhart when they piloted the giant dildo to the center of the earth in The Core). Suspension of disbelief alert: Swank does not look like Mia Kirshner. Sorry.
The twisting tale is based on the novel by James Ellroy, whose own LA Confidential was sort of an indirect sequel.