A family-man gumshoe follows the trail of an apparent snuff film (a genre originally dismissed as an "urban myth") into the S&M underworld, with a Hollywood porn-shop clerk as his guide. Hyperbolic detective story, combining the routine barbarity and depravity of a Matthew Scudder case (Lawrence Block, novelist) with a gaspingly unsophisticated sense of shock and horror. It has an unsophisticated sense, too, of mystery plotting. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, if he hoped to top his Seven, has succeeded only numerically. Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Catherine Keener; directed by Joel Schumacher. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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