The Singing Detective: Critic Reviews

Robert Downey Jr. is great in a role no one less magnetically reckless would dare approach.

The movie lurches when it should glide, shouts when it should whisper and mumbles when it should sing.

Apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.

It's the kind of movie that was made in the spirit of 'Why not?' and will leave most viewers simply asking, 'Why?'

True, Gordon is working from Potter's own adapted script, but it's hard to shake the sense that the writer may simply have been trolling for a Hollywood paycheck.

The problems come in the shadow world, where everything's a jumble, where Dark's compositional strategy ('all clues and no solutions') eventually becomes wearing, and Gordon's direction can't hold it all together.

The casting misfires.

Everything works in the beginning, in fact, but the movie spins out of control toward the end.

The Singing Detective gives you the feeling that someone took a handful of disparate films, chucked them into a blender and poured the results onto the screen.

The new Singing Detective mirrors Potter's growth as well as his originality, and moving from television to silver screen feels like a rewarding round trip.

When I saw it at Sundance, my attention was divided because I was trying to process the meaning of the jagged structure. Seeing it again a week ago, knowing what to expect, I found it a more moving experience.

If the movie doesn't really work, it's because it's a hard piece to bring off, an extremely high mark to hit. Still, enough magic is left, especially in Downey's performance, to shock and beguile us.

Although the screenplay is based on one by the late Potter, it feels like 100 pounds of material crammed into a small Ziploc bag.

Any sober viewers trying to follow this mishmash mystery are going to wish they'd brought along a cache of aspirin.

It stands completely on Downey's tragi-comic performance, although the rest of the cast -- particularly Penn and Gibson -- do good work as well.

Although the miniseries spent time developing the strands of the interwoven stories, the movie flits from idea to idea and plays like a chaotic, failed experiment.

It is worth catching The Singing Detective to see the brilliant Robert Downey Jr. in another extraordinary performance.

While the general contours of Potter's original story are intact, they've lost all their transitional graces.

Without the breathing spaces allowed by the long-form, gone are the slow and developing rhythms of the original, its depth of characterization, and its refusal to sentimentalize a really vicious protagonist.

Fans of the classic Dennis Potter BBC miniseries: Stay far, far away from this pale, Americanized imitation.

A fine example of entertainment -- an eclectic mix of drama, film noir, and comedy, with plenty of fantasy musical numbers thrown in for good measure.

This is a special film in need of TLC in its marketing.

For all the amazing lengths Downey and Gibson go to, the two actors seem to exist in a vacuum, for this stiff film is virtually devoid of a sense of texture, flow or wit.