The only real bright spot in the film is Mark Ruffalo whom I declared as bland in previous reviews, but I've just about dismissed my own feelings because he actually saves this from becoming a completely awful mess. With a believable New York accent, he manages to concoct some good mannerisms as a seasoned cop who is shrewd and rude in nature. I really enjoyed his dialogue and intense character that made him despicable and likable all at the same time. He plays off well against Meg Ryan, and is really appealing as a quasi-villain and shifty eyed character.

So what do we have here? We have two really horrible things, a film that tries to be Indie though it's obvious it's big budget Hollywood fare, and Meg Ryan who tries to be indie, sexual, plain, ugly, and dark all at the same time, and none of it works for her. Meg Ryan is not any of these things, she's more the girl next door type, beautiful, stunning, likable, but plain, nah it doesn't work for her.

With her stringy dark brown hair, obvious painted on dark circles and wearing clothes I've only seen a grandmother wear, she tries to go all out and be taken seriously as an actress, but why? She's lovable, she's charming, she's attractive and within a lot of the forced sexual scenes including one full frontal masturbation scene, and a lot of nudity, she looks like a young actress trying to prove she can act, but why is she? What is she trying to prove in this? That she can act? We know that, that she's sexual? We know that, so what is she trying to get across?

Nonetheless this gritty, droning, and overly annoying film dressed as an independent arthouse picture that turns into a gimmick with wobbly cameras, darkness and grime galore that makes the city look like a jungle, so much so, there were times when I couldn't make out what was happening, and a lot of scenes that don't really make sense, it's obvious we
have something pretending to be what its not.

There are a lot of long scenes focused on a particular object almost as if its trying to accomplish symbolism and a paradox that never works but really looks forced and trite, there were long scenes focused on one object that I tried to discover if they were symbols for anything in the film but it simply left me frustrated because a lot of the scenes with the long silences made absolutely no sense regardless of how hard it tried to, there's even this really annoying plot device in the film where Ryan's character reads a poem bit on a billboard in the train which always happens to be dictating her every move or mood.

I've been on New York subways all the time, and I see a lot of those poems advertising a museum, but rarely are they ever so good I say "Yeah, that's exactly how I feel!" Ryan plays
Frannie, a school teacher who is seemingly sexually repressed, though by the way she interacts with characters in the film that's a far stretch, so she seems very sexually amorous, but we're given the impression she doesn't have a lot of romance, but with no morals and no real common sense she's somehow able to easily become engrossed in
an underground world.

An underground world of what exactly still remains a mystery, but a portion of the movie is
comprised of her sexual exploration, so there are a lot of things that don't work here. Now, I've never said school teachers should be saints, but she doesn't seem to have any morals whatsoever. She parades herself around every man in the film flirting and then pulling back, and so on and then when she's drawn into a jam we're supposed to root for her or sympathize to some effect, but it was pretty difficult seeing as how she has no likable qualities to her.

Whether or not she's aware of how she comes off as a character is hard to say, but she plays mind games with every character here, she has nothing about her to like because she's bland, and has a bi-polar personality. So, she enters into what looks like sexual exploration at a club where she meets one of her students for a study session and she witnesses someone having sex, the day after a woman ends up being murdered and she begins having an affair with a sketchy cop who may or may not be the murderer.

Mark Ruffalo, whom I've said before is bland, but is actually a good actor, and possibly the only bright spot in this, plays Malloy, an enigma of a detective investigating the string (there's only four) of murders. He's kind of an odd character with a lot of questionable activities and signs that he may be the murderer and somehow Franny is infatuated with him. Now, it's probably just me, but if I suspected someone was a murderer, I wouldn't sleep with them... but that's just me. Then again, it'd all depend. I mean, if it was Ashley Judd or Diane Lane... then maybe.

Regardless they have a very vapid and awfully dull affair with one another and they seem to be very infatuated with each other. Again, Malloy isn't a good character; he's blunt, nasty, perverted, disgusting, and sleazy, but it's what turns Franny on. They seem to be attracted to each other, and the film continues on with this downward spiral of confusion on whether it's a drama or a who dunnit, and the hybrid isn't very appealing.

Director Campion tries very hard here to achieve some sort of artistic impact with a lot of
scenes that are purposely fuzzy, and some are tilted and red and I just lost a lot of patience, because she seems to be trying to flex her abilities as a director for no real reason. The direction whether light or dark had no effect on whether this would turn out to be a good film or not.

Now call me slow, but I just couldn't follow what the exact genre of the film was. Was it a modern noir, a murder mystery, a twisted romance, a crime drama? The film is never really sure what it's trying to accomplish so by the climax with its numerous red herrings, forced surprise ending, a plot twist that I saw coming, and a stilted last moments, I was not impressed.

Ryan tries to prove something here, but we're never sure what, and the film drips with a trite effort at going about everything as an art house mystery when really it's just not. Though the performance by Mark Ruffalo is the highlight of the film, this brings nothing to the table with a dull, derivative, nonsensical and pretentious effort at crime mystery.

• Nicole Kidman was originally cast as Franny.