A dame walked into a hard-boiled voice over… and just like that, I realized I was watching a sci-fi detective noire. And my heart kind of sank a little as the narration continued to try too hard. This movie isn’t about a hard-boiled detective, it’s more scrambled… and weirdly sunny-side up.

The film takes place in a near future flooded Miami after various troubles have left people looking to flee into their own memories (or possibly into a 1930s detective novel). Hugh Jackman runs just such a sci-fi service. Into his life walks the dame, a smokin’ songstress (and temptress) who needs his help… through flashback upon flashback… and, of course, we learn about the dark heart of this crooked town.

This movie is aware of film noire but it doesn’t really “get” it. It’s like a child putting on a gangster suit and tie… it just doesn’t fit and feels like the kids are playing dress-up. I dig Hugh Jackman but he doesn’t really fit the hard-bitten detective mold, which would be fine if not for his voice-over which feels off (and over-written). The mystery itself is twisty and convoluted enough that I lost track and felt kind of dumb for it… though maybe my confusion was expected given the genre.

I did like the world-building and how geopolitical issues are just history to the characters but decent dark shading for us. The flooded cities look nice and I was grimly amused to see they were filming some scenes at Six Flags New Orleans which I’d just recently seen in the documentary “Closed For Storm”. I had some issues with some of the shots of the flooded cities but that was just me being nit-picky.

There were a handful of moments in the film that were as cool as they mistakenly thought the whole movie was. I liked a gun fight in a restaurant and there’s a very beautiful imagery in a flooded ballroom. Most of the rest of the movie just trades on the nice visual FX shots and aforementioned location scenes though. Also a lot of brightly lit scenes which are an interesting choice and probably deliberately at odds with the genre.

This is a miss of a movie but, I think, not too big of a miss. If they had just toned down the overwritten tough-guy dialog / voice-over and maybe shaved off some of the other attempts at film noire, they’d have a more original and creative film.

Score: 74