I think with a darker tone, a sharper more defined cast who could offer up better performances, and a clearer focus on atmosphere and its time period, "Charlie Valentine" could have been a truly excellent neo-noir gem that could spread with word of mouth. Sadly, as it stands, the film is only mildly entertaining with its thumb on the mediocre the entire time. "Charlie Valentine" should make for a thrilling piece of crime cinema, but in reality it's very listless and drab and lacks in any really interesting characters. That's especially true with the title character Charlie, a man who we're told has seen and done it all, a man once at the prime of the criminal underground, but Raymond J. Barry looks completely out of place among the crime decor and gives a performance that's pretty stilted. Most of the time he's on-screen he looks bored and almost like he's phoning it in, and the same can be said for the likes of Tom Berenger and Keith David, both of whom have walk on roles that are pretty slim in entertainment value when all is said and done.

So while the characters talk like they've been ripped out of pulp fiction novels, dress like swingers, and drive around in vintage cars, they're also in the city with billboards, and trains and make use of cell phones, all of which feels so impossibly thrown together that it's distracting at times. The film completely deviates from its original premise to veer in to a pretty bland series of interactions with Charlie and his long lost son, a petty gangster who re-connects with his dad and soon begs to be brought in to the crime business when they begin to bond. The dialogue is hammy, the dramatic tension is stilted, and the crime diatribes are just unabashed cliches thrown at audiences all the while the real plot takes a backseat to Barry and his co-star Michael Weatherly.

The plot with Valentine and his son is about as trite as a movie like this would warrant. Charlie is escaping his old life, meets his son, and they bond. Charlie hopes to redeem himself through his son, his son's wife likes Charlie but warns his son that he's a snake in a fine suit, and the past is slowly creeping up on Charlie every day he's hiding out. During this time the villains torture rats to the tune of classical music, Charlie displays an irritating fetish for opera and pines over the ghosts of his past lovers, and the film comes to the invariably ho hum showdown in the finale testing the bonds of father and son and painting the story a healthy shade of gray. With much better performers and richer character development that didn't border on a by the numbers genre installment, "Charlie Valentine" could be a pure hidden gem, but it's just a lethargic genre piece.

While the premise is ripe for something of a journey in to darkness with a rich exploration in to good and evil, "Charlie Valentine" is just a ho hum and tedious crime thriller with an abundance of clichés, wooden performances all around, and a narrative that's been recycled a million times over.