Slow Burn (2007)
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Ray Liotta, Jolene Blalock, LL Cool J, Taye Diggs, Chjwetel Ejiofor
Screenwriter: Wayne Beach
Producer: Sidney Kimmel, Fisher Stevens, Bonnie Timmermann
Composer: Jeff Rona
DVD Info
Release:
Jul 24, 2007
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
- Widescreen
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround - English
- Dolby Digtital 2.0 Stereo - English
- Subtitles - English, Spanish - Optional
Additional Release Material:
- Alternate Scenes
- Audio Commentary - Wayne Beach - Director
- Deleted Scenes
- Featurette - FIRE IN THE STREETS
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
Its cavalcade of 'twists' in the last 20 minutes come off the conveyor belt so quickly and haphazardly that they all wind up in a big pile on the floor, waiting to be snorted at by incredulous viewers.
It's not a brilliant movie. It's certainly not worth canceling any appointments to catch at the theater. But it's more than worth a quick look on cable, or even an impulsive rental.
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