Dark Crimes
The moderately competent but hardly scintillating “Dark Crimes” luxuriates in its dreariness, basking in an oppressive, gray palette that underscores a tawdry tale about a Polish detective trying to solve a murder in connection with a sex club that brutalizes women.
Proving that more is often less, the film gets off to an exploitive start with a series of scenes of nude women being dragged off to a dingy room to be raped. These old videotape images are meant to create outrage and to set up the story, but they have a gratuitous feel, and the film struggles to get its bearings at first.
In a vast departure from his comic roles in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and “Dumb and Dumber,” Jim Carrey plays humorless, grizzled detective Tadek, who is on the outs with his superiors, as is every other police officer in this kind of movie. Tadek has recently discovered that an author’s new audio novel has eerie similarities to a cold murder case, wherein he begins to unearth deep, dark secrets and perhaps turn around his reputation.
Though Tadek’s role is underwritten — we find ourselves wanting to know more about his family and what brought on his career troubles — Carrey is never less than convincing, even as he employs an Eastern European accent and remains uniformly dour throughout the film. The more interesting character is the wily author and suspected murderer, Kozlow (Marton Czokas, very good), whose vile readings of his book are chilling. Also making an appearance is Kozlow’s girlfriend, Kasia (Charlotte Gainsbourg, solid), who complicates Tadek’s investigation in more ways than one.
Regardless of how one might feel about its inherently icky subject matter, “Dark Crimes” needs more narrative momentum. The cast is game, the production design is impressive and a few surprises await — but even as things heat up, the film somehow remains cold.