Slow Burn

With its convoluted storyline and forgettable sense of style, Slow Burn can’t help but feel like a typically overblown straight-to-video thriller. This is despite the presence of folks like Ray Liotta, Taye Diggs, and LL Cool J in the film’s cast, but at the film’s core is a mystery that simply isn’t interesting. Liotta stars as a district attorney who finds himself embroiled in a massive conspiracy involving a notorious crime boss, while Enterprise‘s Jolene Blalock plays a bi-racial lawyer who may or may not be telling the truth about a violent rape that kicks off the story. While Slow Burn does admittedly pick up towards the end – as the film morphs into a flat-out ripoff of The Usual Suspects – there’s virtually nothing in the first hour that even comes close to holding the viewer’s interest. In his efforts to keep the various plot strands and character deceptions straight, writer/director Wayne Beach has neglected to turn any of these people into figures worth caring about. And though his script is peppered with some choice bits of dialogue (ie “she walked into the room smelling like mashed potatoes and every guy wanted to be the gravy”), Beach imbues the movie with an smoky, unpleasant visual style that becomes an annoyance almost immediately.

** out of ****