Michael Mann’s crime opera clocks in at over 3 hours. It is too long, but not by much. The trimming of one plot line could have made this cool and intricate crime drama excellent. Instead, it is merely very good.

Robert De Niro and his crew of criminals (which includes Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer) are master thieves in LA.  Al Pacino and his crew of cops (which includes Wes Studi and Mykelti Williams) are master thief busters. The criminals plan and execute three jobs, and the cops try and stop them, while juggling family, wives/girlfriends, and the hazards of the professions.

The opening and closing heists are brilliantly staged by Mann, especially a bravura bank job gone wrong in downtown LA.  De Niro’s crew tears through the police, making Swiss cheese of them in a several block, by-car and then on-foot getaway. I had always assumed the scene was based on a real-life North Hollywood shootout where 2 heavily armed men In body armor robbed a bank, were confronted by lightly armed police and injured a dozen of them before being shot down.  In fact, the real-life robbery came two years after the movie.

The story also smartly weaves the stories of a three secondary characters (a member of De Niro’s crew who was kicked out and seeks revenge; a crooked investor for drug interests who takes exception to being ripped of by De Niro’s crew; and, a recently paroled criminal trying to stay out of the game), all of whom intersect with and enhance the primary plot.  Pacino’s relationship with his third wife and her emotionally fragile daughter (Natalie Portman) is also handled well. The wife is not a stoic sufferer but a modern, divorced and frustrated character who is too focused on Pacino to the detriment of her child.

I have three complaints. First, Pacino goes a little too Scent of a Woman. He is so ferocious at times that it is hard to stifle a chuckle, and his accent is strangely southern, then it is not. He is either very good in the movie (his low-key confrontation over coffee with De Niro is one such moment) or he is cartoonish (the entire scene with his informant is bizarre; Pacino looks like he might start speaking in tongues and “Hoooooo-AHHHHHH” never seems far off).

ACTUAL STILL FROM THE PICTURE

Second, the attempt to humanize De Niro by introducing a forced love interest with Amy Brenneman is a mistake and it interrupts the pace. The relationship is unconvincing and as such, does not explain certain choices De Niro makes at the end.  Given the brutality of De Niro (by my count, he kills or wounds a dozen cops and orders the execution of a security guard), it is enough for us to root for him only when he is pitted against others of his ilk. But the attempt to make the audience empathize with his lonely life of crime is several bridges too far.

Third, Val Kilmer’s escape is unconvincing, making a police character we’d been led to believe was sharp look borderline incompetent.

Otherwise, this is a stylish, gripping picture.  And for music fans, Henry Rollins and Tone Loc get minor roles.  Also, it features a young Ashley Judd, who bravely allowed herself to look as worn and haggard as the wife of a brutal, volatile and uncommunicative criminal should.

Lurid, inane, bordering on the sick, Simon West’s picture attempts to tell the story of the murder of a military woman on a Georgia base. She is tied to the ground by tent pegs, spread-eagled, naked, and strangled. West lovingly lingers on the image. Worse, her physical entrapment is connected to a gang rape in similar circumstances years prior. West cruelly enjoys that image as well.

But forget The General’s Daughter as a pseudo snuff film. Even if you can get by that horror, you are left with four insurmountable handicaps.

First, the story is absurd. When a new clue is required to move it along, boom! – it drops out of nowhere. When the investigators (John Travolta and Madeline Stowe) must wrangle information from the daughter’s psychiatrist, they suggest a breach of his medical ethics that is so moronic you can’t believe it has been penned for the screen. If another clue is needed, Travolta just sticks a gun to the head of a character and there you have it -the beans are spilled. When Stowe confronts a suspect in the gang rape seven years earlier, she uses the most obvious technique in the book (the threat of DNA evidence on the daughter’s panties), he succumbs, and voila’ – case solved. Apart from the hackneyed interrogation technique (gasp! – they were just-bought panties, not old panties, and it was all a bluff!), the suspect confesses that he tried to stop the rape, but was unable to do so. Which begs the question: WHY WOULD A BLUFF AS TO HIS DNA ON PANTIES FAZE HIM IN THE SLIGHTEST IF HE WAS NOT ONE OF THE GANG RAPISTS?

Second, the acting is abysmal. Travolta is particularly awful, a condescending bore overly taken with himself. Stowe is useless, and her puffy, mis-shapen face, distorted by collagen and who knows what else, is upsetting, especially when one remembers her in The Last of the Mohicans. With the exception of an interesting weird turn as the daughter’s mentor by James Woods, the rest of the characters are forgettably stock.

Third, the film unintentionally creates a sub-theme of backlash against women in the military. Ostensibly, the film presents women in the military as a good thing, and West clumsily ties the daughter’s gang rape and murder years later to this new phenomenon. Yet, when Travolta and Stowe question a female guard who was on post the night the daughter was murdered, the female solider is a) incompetent; b) blubbering like a brook; and then c) blase’, as she explains to the investigators that people on base often came to the scene of the crime all the time “to fu**.” Add the truly bizarre behavior of the daughter (she essentially sleeps with everyone under her general father’s command), the depiction of military men as almost crazed in their dislike of women in their ranks, the creepy mutual attraction of Woods and the daughter (he is her superior in the chain of command), the fact that Stowe and the daughter – both military women – are made to look sexually enticing (even sporting cherry red lipstick), and an early sexual foxtrot between Travolta and the daughter, and you get the feeling that maybe this film is anti-women in the military. Either that, or West is doing some recruiting. Join Up! The Chicks are Hot!

Finally, if you don’t know who the murderer is in the first 20 minutes, you were probably shocked that the boat sank in Titanic.

Terence Stamp plays a just-released British convict who comes to Los Angeles to investigate the death of his estranged daughter.  Stamp is a tough guy, but not Bob Hoskins cockney and bluster, The Long Good Friday tough (thankfully, Stamp is more intelligible). He’s icy and removed, grimly determined to get to the bottom of his daughter’s death. His search opens several leads, the most promising being Peter Fonda, a record executive who made his bones in the 60s, and Barry Newman, Fonda’s dubious associate (Newman was a 70s American television staple as “Petrocelli” the lawyer).

As icons of the 60s, Fonda and Stamp are dinosaurs, two powerful men not quite at ease in the 90s, and Soderbergh uses them to insert a generational disconnect in a taut psychological crime thriller.

Stamp evokes the macho rage of an absent father well. His anger burns, even though his memories are but a few snippets and stories (he was in prison for a great period of her upbringing). His inner demon is not so much what he lost, but what he squandered, and he’s powerful.

Where Stamp is driven, Fonda is resigned. He senses that his time is past, and his desperation is palpable. His weakness is subtle (his conversations with a lover 30 years his junior are wonderfully pained, the scripted equivalent of a middle-aged man in a Porsche, a head mottled by Rogaine, and “The Byrds” on the CD, as he waxes about his past, only to be met with “Oh, I think you’ve told me that story”).

Solid noir.

The Black Dahlia. Right at mid-point, you realize that Brian De Palma actually makes the Elizabeth Short murder, one of the most sensational in American history, humdrum. Worse, the entire film is spent with Josh Hartnett, who is attempting a medium cool but merely achieves dull. His weak performance doesn’t really matter, because you don’t know what the hell is going on anyway. The film is grotesque, confusing and embarrassing. Based on the first of author James Ellroy’s L.A. quartet, its only value is as a crappy comparator to the classic L.A. Confidential.