Average Rating: 3.7/10
Reviews Counted: 33
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 29
With wooden acting and hammy, overheated dialogue, Slow Burn isn't so much a noir as it is a mediocre parody of one.
Average Rating: 3.5/10
Critic Reviews: 12
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 10
With wooden acting and hammy, overheated dialogue, Slow Burn isn't so much a noir as it is a mediocre parody of one.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 6,996
A cop trying to clear the name of a woman he loves falls deep into a morass of corruption in this crime thriller. Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) is the district attorney in a crime-ridden town where he's contemplating a run for mayor in a bid for greater power. Cole is also having an affair with one of his assistants, Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock), though he tries to keep that a secret. One evening, while Cole is chatting with journalist Trippin (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Timmer arrives with startling news --
Apr 13, 2007 Wide
Jul 24, 2007
$1.2M
Lions Gate Films
All Critics (33) | Top Critics (12) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (31) | DVD (4)
Shelved for over a year, this incompetent mystery thriller stops periodically so some character or other can deliver an expository speech and pull the plot back on track, but by the end the story has turned into a hair ball.
A strange, sprained, but sprightly fusion of The Usual Suspects and the Tragic Mulatto, Slow Burn wants badly to turn its standard neo-noir into a nuanced racial chiaroscuro.
If you have not figured out the identity of Luden by the finale, it will only be because you do not care.
The bigger problem is that for all the plot turns and reversals and flashes of action that Beach has structured into his film, there's an elusive extra something that's missing.
John Grisham meets The Usual Suspects by way of late-night Cinemax in this derivative thriller.
Nothing is what it seems -- unless it seems cheesy.
Sluggish thriller mixes flashbacks and deception.
A slow death.
Teeming with lurid atmosphere, Slow Burn touches on mutual stalking, inner city gangsta capitalism, and detonation of a ghetto as part of a lucrative urban removal gentrification scheme concocted by the city elite.
A slow death.
The screenplay is riddled with so many problems, clichés, cheats, and borrowed ideas that the movie never takes off on a story level.
Barely flickers as a far-fetched urban tale of chameleon-like characters.
...the story is intriguing enough to hold our interest through all the film noir pretensions...
When a movie has been sitting around since 2003, why wouldn't you just throw it at the DVD shelf rather than subjecting big-screen audiences to it?
Easy to understand why Slow Burn sat on the shelf for four years, but harder to understand why it didn't go straight to DVD or Showtime late night.
One wonders why Slow Burn wasn't just dumped completely.
Slow Burn tries to be smolder, but ultimately there's no heat.
The theme of racial confusion that attempts to underlie this would-be noirish murder mystery becomes just one more unintentionally hilarious aspect...
Deficiencies aside, Slow Burn is almost worth seeing.
Writer-director Wayne Beach figures if you liked Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie's big climactic reversal, you'll love four of them in a row!
A pretty decent crime thriller with a strong cast. Not a lot of action but I thought it was a good story with some decent plot twists. In some elements it is like the usual suspects in the way the story unfolds with quite a few red herrings along the way. An enjoyable film that seemed to slip under the radar.
August 25, 2008Super Reviewer
A sizzeling, sexy and blistering crime thriller. Bursting with riveting and nail-biting twist and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat. The suspense snaps and crackels like live wire. Intelligent and satisfying. Smart, stylish and very compelling. It gets better as it rips through the layers. An explosively
July 29, 2007Super Reviewer
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