MBunge This attempt at creating an inner city version of The Usual Suspects, complete with its own ghetto Keyser Soze, flounders about in a Dead Sea of expository dialog and flashbacks before beaching itself upon a conclusion that doesn't make a lick of logical or dramatic sense. Writer/director Wayne Beach is so caught up in his own supposed cleverness that he forgets some basic elements of storytelling, resulting in a film that will bore the pants off you.Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) is the District Attorney for Los Angeles who also happens to be running for mayor. While being interviewed by Vanity Fair journalist Ty Trippin (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Cole is informed that his top gang prosecutor just shot a man. Norah Timmer (Jolene Blalock) says the guy was a stalker who broke into her house and raped her. Cole believes Norah, at least partly because the two of them are secretly lovers, until a man calling himself Luther Pinks (LL Cool J) walks into the police department with a completely different story. He says the dead man's name is Isaac Duperde (Mekhi Phifer) and that Isaac and Norah were lovers. Pinks spins a tale of Norah dragging Isaac deeper and deeper into…well, it's never really clear why she does any of the things she does or why Isaac goes along or what it's all supposed to result in. Even after watching the mystery be revealed at the end, I still don't know why any of it actually happened.The nonsensical scheme does involve a multi-million dollar real estate deal and a gang leader named Danny Luden that Cole is obsessed with convicting even though he's never seen Danny's face or knows who he is. The whole thing revolves around something that's going to happen at 5 AM and, believe it or not, the confusion over whether Norah is a white woman pretending to be black or a black woman who can pass for white. The whole thing wraps up in the extremely rare quintuple twist which is so empty, superficial and stupid that it demonstrates why only morons think they can slap 5 plot twists on the end of their film.Slow Burn starts out violating the first rule of filmmaking and just goes on from there. The rule is "show, not tell" and this story is entirely built and carried out by characters telling other characters things. It has multiple narrators leading the audience through multiple flashbacks interrupted only by more conversations in the present. The main character in all the flashbacks is Isaac, but we're never shown or even told anything about what kind of man he's is or why we should care about him. Ford Cole is the main character in the present, but he's so passive he might as well be a walking doormat. The secret agenda of Danny Luden is also so blatantly red flagged that even a blind and deaf person would notice it. And all Jolene Blalock does in this movie is briefly show off both her boobs and how bad her hair looks in corn rows.Slow Burn is a movie where people you don't care about tell stories about other people you don't care about until springing a surprise ending you still don't care about. Unless you're a big Star Trek geek and want to see T'Pol's hooters, there's no reason to waste your time with this film.

Roland E. Zwick In the opening scene of "Slow Burn," an assistant district attorney (Jolene Blalock) is found wandering the streets of the city, disheveled and confused, informing those who find her that she has just killed a rapist in self defense. The alleged attacker (Mekhi Phifer) was a man she supposedly met one night in a record store and who then proceeded to stalk her for weeks thereafter. Suddenly, into the head D.A.'s office strides LL Cool J, as a friend of the deceased who has a considerably different story to tell about the events leading up to the murder as well as an entirely disparate take on the couple's relationship. Things get even more dicey when we discover that the D.A. (Ray Liotta) and the assistant D.A. have been conducting a torrid affair of their own for a number of years now."Slow Burn" fails on so many levels of rudimentary storytelling and film-making that it's hard to know where exactly to begin in compiling a list of its shortcomings. To start with, there's something inherently self-defeating and pointless in constructing a narrative from two widely conflicting viewpoints - a la "Rashomon" - when one of the supposed eyewitnesses is already dead and, thus, unable to personally relate his side of the story. How does it enhance the verisimilitude of the tale if most of our information has to come filtered down to us through a secondhand source, a person who wasn't even present at the events he's describing - unless, of course, he was hiding in a nearby closet during all those "intimate" moments he is able to recount in such juicy and exhaustive detail? Either that or the murder victim was one of the chattiest, kiss-and-tell gossips in the history of the movies. And why does it take till the closing reels for the supposedly intelligent professional investigators to smell a rat in that setup? Eventually, the twist-and-turn plotting leads to so much incoherence and confusion that you might well wonder if the filmmakers themselves understood what it was they were doing.Beyond the clumsy, inscrutable storytelling, "Slow Burn" also suffers from some of the most overripe dialogue this side of "The Black Dahlia." With such knee-slapping howlers as "She stood there like a tangerine, ripe and ready to be peeled" and "She walked in smelling like mashed potatoes and every guy within thirty feet wanted to be the gravy," the script could easily win First Prize in a Bad Film Noir Writing contest. It's hard to believe at such times that the film isn't actually intended to be a parody (the acting sure suggests it on occasion). On second thought, perhaps it would be best to stick with that notion; it just might go down easier that way.

mikestaley78 I must say I just finished watching this movie, and what a waste. I agree this movie had some great actors (Ray Liotta), and a decent plot. However, I lost interest in this movie after a while and was just waiting for it to end, and did not really care how it ended. The usual suspects ripoff was evident in that there was a crime lord, in this case a Danny Ludden, as compared to the Kaiser Sosa of Usual Suspects who nobody had ever really seen. Yeah right. This movie tried to tell us that the Danny Ludden character owned property all over "the city", which they slipped and called Detriot once, and controlled a gang that ran Detroit, and no one had ever seen him. Wow, this is an amazing concept. Meanwhile the Assistant DA who Ray Liotta is banging is intertwined within the movie as a rape suspect/murder suspect who is thought to be black, but is really white. Is the viewer to believe that in this day in age in the US there can be an Assistant DA in a city like Detroit who is using a false identity and no one catches this? Oh well, don't waste your time, watch the Usual Suspects for a decent movie with a good plot.

Chev_Chelios I remember growing up on films such as The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Fugitive, films with enough plot twists and turns to keep things fresh and interesting. I was more than pleasantly surprised to see excellent performances from an otherwise pieced-together cast of Ray Liotta, Taye Diggs, LL Cool J, Mekhi Phifer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and of course Jolene Blalock. I enjoyed every minute of this film whose score and choice of background, and especially credit, music made it all that much more memorable.Personally, I love films in, around, or about the city. Without giving anything away, Slow Burn deals with corruption and a little gang-related mystery; all the while providing that sense of empathy for Liotta's character that seems all too absent in modern films today.No, this film is not for everyone, but if you can remember what it was like to be genuinely stringed along and interested in what happens at every twist and turn of those 90's film plots, then you should find yourself feeling that you got you're 9.50's worth on a Friday night.