I love film noir and I like indie films, but I found very little to like in this one. For starters, the film is shot in chapters, and each 15-minute chapter (they seem much longer than that, trust me) is a single unbroken hand-held shot. Why? you ask. Absolutely no idea. But the result of this gratuitous construct is that each conversation (and the movie is mostly endless conversation) involves the handheld camera panning from one speaker to the next speaker and back again, over and over and over again. This contributes to a growing sense of vertigo in the viewer as the film progresses. And in the unlikely event that you can get past that, then you've got the script to deal with - an absolutely preposterous and nonsensical hodge-podge of secret identities and hidden relationships that makes not one iota of sense. Mr. Hawkes seems to have cut out a career for himself playing essentially sleaze-bag end-of-the-line private investigators: he recently reprised almost the identical role in another awful film called Small Town Crime. He and some of the other actors are competent, but there is simply nothing to be done with a script this inept.
Review of Too Late
