Manhattan Night (2016)

Just perfect...

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Manhattan Nocturne is a modern noir murder mystery starring Adrien Brody as a hard boiled crime reporter Wren Porter writing for a tabloid newspaper now under the new ownership of a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch clone, Hobbs (Steven Berkoff.)Porter is hired by Caroline (Yvonne Strahovski) whose husband a film director called Crowley (Campbell Scott) was murdered and whose death remains unsolved.However Caroline really wants Porter to find out who is sending sex footage contained in a memory card to a wealthy tycoon.Porter becomes attracted to Caroline, the wealthy tycoon sends his goons to hurt Porter, the deceased husband was a sleazeball and Caroline herself had a troubled childhood.The film starts off in a clichéd manner, it is portentous, sluggish and really not hard boiled or sleazy enough.Strahovski is seductive but despite bearing some flesh never gets to Basic Instinct level erotic. Brody who also produced the film looks miscast and the turgid voice-over becomes grating. Scott as the manipulative husband who ends up tormenting Caroline also looks miscast as he just looks uncomfortable in that type of role.The film benefits from a strong second half as the plot gets more tightly wound but director Brian DeCubellis cannot elevate the source material.

We watched this at home on DVD from our public library. It is an interesting story but things are presented in a way that often makes it hard to grasp exactly what is going on.Set in modern times, 2015 Manhattan, Adrien Brody is Porter Wren, a dying breed of newspaper investigative reporter. As he says in the voice-over today with all the social media that all the younger generation loves a story with pictures goes around so efficiently that once it hits the newsstand in print it is old news.But he did find a lost child and for that he gained a reputation and is sought after to find out what really happened in an 18-month old case of death. The one doing the seeking is the dead man's wife, Yvonne Strahovski as Caroline Crowley. We only see her husband in flashbacks, he is Campbell Scott as filmmaker Simon Crowley. We find that he proposed to Caroline the same night he met her, at a bar, and she accepted. But he turned out to be a really deranged guy. But now she wants to know how he actually died.Wren's wife is a noted surgeon, Jennifer Beals, still looking young in her 50s, as doctor Lisa Wren.We were entertained, it is an interesting story with some interesting twists, but not all of them made a lot of sense.SPOILERS: As it turns out the husband died in her presence. He was playing this dangerous "dare" game in an abandoned building set for demolition the next day. He had her chained to an elevator, threatened to let it pull her down if she didn't answer his questions. She gets the jump and kills him with a stab to the neck but he had swallowed the key to her ankle restraint. So she had to use a bottle opened to cut him open and get the key. All caught on video that Wren discovers. The real reason she hired Wren was to find out who was sending SD cards with damning video to Mr Hobbs, the quirky owner of the newspaper Wren worked for. Her deceased husband had set that up with an innocent woman who got $500 a week just to mail the duplicate SD cards to Mr Hobbs.

The film was based on the book named 'Manhattan Nocturne'. Excellently made film, it's the director's first feature film as well. He did not get the top actors, but these actors were the good ones. Adrien Brody and Yvonne Strahovski were amazing their respective roles. It was not a detective story, but very close to being one. So if you love crime-mysteries, then you should try this. The tone of the film makes very interesting. It's not about the question of story prediction, but how cleverly it was advanced like the characters were transformed compared to the opening and the conclusion.Some films open strongly, but ends poorly. In this case, the opening was average, but ended on a high. The main reason is the middle parts, keeping all contents together and developing some suspense with a couple of quick twists made this film to reach the expectation made by its viewers. It was a tale of a recently famed reporter finds an affair with a young widow, despite he's married with a child. Soon, he discovers some mysterious men are watching him, who threatening his family as well. How he gets out of that trouble by finding reasons behind it is what the rest of the film narrates.It looked a lot like a television film. Not because of the production quality, actually the production was top class, but the story and its narration felt kind of like a mini-series type. I don't know how many books are there, but I want this to continue, at least as a television film series. One of the best of its kind, I almost liked everything about the film. But I still feel I underrated it, at the end I'm satisfied with what I gave. Definitely, I recommend it.7/10

"I'm always running to the place where the bad thing just happened, arriving just after the danger has passed, watching from a safe distance, searching for an angle, that little wrinkle, the kick to the heart that makes you want to put down the dollar and pick up the paper."After seeing two not so good films with Adrien Brody ("Backtrack" and "American Heist") I noticed that sad look of him on the cover of "Manhattan Night". It might sound weird, but every time I see Brody's facial expression on a cover, at once a sense of gloom and sadness overtakes me. Examine once again the cover from "Backtrack" and that of, lets say, "Wrecked". Every time you see a person filled with melancholy. With those sad puppy eyes and a grim facial expression. He stares at you with a helpless and beseeching look. The man exudes melancholy.Despite his distinctive physical traits, he reminded me of Jake Gyllenhaal hunting for sensational news in "Nightcrawler". The same profession, the same eagerness and the same melancholy look. The only major difference is that Porter Wren already had his victory moment in the past when a young girl was found after his journalistic work. Hence, he still takes care of a daily column in the New York Daily News. Even though the new owner of this newspaper isn't very enthusiastic about it. At first you might say that Porter is a boring and rational person. But then again, he hasn't taken Caroline Crowley (Yvonne Strahovski) into account. The moment he sees her at a party, he's lost and he becomes entangled in the seductive web of this blond vamp. Caroline's interest in Porter is also of a practical nature. She wants to use Porter's "Sherlock Holmes" skills to investigate the suspicious death of her husband Simon Crowley (Campbell Scott).You'll experience something similar like "Basic Instinct" with Brody acting as a sort of Poirot who's persistent in solving a case. In addition, he has to deal with a case of extortion, so the whole thing gets even more complicated. A story full of intrigue and erotically charged scenes. Brody's daily column is about other people's misery. It looks like he's becoming the main character in such a column. Although all my attention should be drawn to the stormy affair between Porter and Caroline and the complicated developments gripping Porter, my attention went to the rather extravagant personality of Crowley. A slightly deranged movie producer with some absurd traits. A real weirdo with a weird sense of humor. Such a person who pretends to having commit suicide after swallowing a large number of pills. And then he gets up calmly and says it was just a joke. And a highly attractive, breathtaking erotic blonde falls in love with such an eccentric who looks like a bum? Women are unfathomable and inapprehensible. But the acting of Campbell Scott was beyond dispute extremely brilliant.All in all not a bad movie. Not bad at all. But not a high flyer either. Turn it into a black and white film and you can place it between other Hollywood classics which are shown on a pay-per-view television-channel. It won't be noticed. You can call this film stylish though. "Manhattan Night" pretends to be a neo-noir film with a mystery build into. But in the end it isn't really mysterious. More reviews here : http://bit.ly/1KIdQMT