Insomnia

Good cast, good location, good script − which all adds up to a goodish movie. So, where did the missing 21 grams of satisfaction go to?

It was certainly grippingly suspenseful throughout, and although I've never been a huge fan of Pacino, his performance never quite rankles, even when his character Will Dormer is getting progressively bleary. It also has a couple of very memorable pedestrian chase scenes - one involving swirling fog on a pebble beach and the other traversing a river on floating logs.

Christopher Nolan has built his reputation on chronologically-challenged narratives that deliver a thought-provoking climax, but here we get a shoot-out from central casting, and all the intricacy that was carefully constructed in the mid section collapses into comparative simplicity. In fairness Nolan didn't write this one himself; it's a remake of a Norwegian film of the same name from 1997. Yet maybe that's the point − he had to take a small, clever script and coat it with Hollywood formula and celebrity, and at the end it feels just a bit overstretched.

Incidentally, in the original there is no Internal Affairs sub-plot, rather the detective that accidentally kills his partner is a Swede who shouldn't be carrying a gun in Norway.