Melodrama is structurally incapable of telling you anything about the setting in which it takes place. (The best introduction to melodramatic narrative structure is Peter Brooks's work of literary history and criticism The Melodramatic Imagination, though the genre appeals to Brooks far more than it does to me.) A character who represents pure goodness, here Ving Rhames, goes up against a character who represents pure evil, Gleeson, and the plot leads to the triumphant public unmasking of the evil character, the villain.

To the extent Dark Blue has struck some people as complex it's because the star role occupies an intermediate position between good and evil. But such figures only make the melodrama more complicated on the surface. Russell does reprehensible things for the bad guy but at the climax he's the one who denounces the villain at a public ceremony. He's simply shuttled like an abacus bead from one end of the moral continuum to the other. The fact that the representative of morality is left out of the action only deforms the story. You wonder why he's there at all; it's not as if, but for his scowling presence, we might mistake Russell for a good cop. The climactic denunciation is the same scene as the one at the climax of The Fugitive (1993), which nobody took to be a serious exposé of pharmaceutical companies. No matter how explicitly the moviemakers state their intentions, the plot is about defeating some Halloween-masquerade devil, who is highly interchangeable from movie to movie.

What underlies the formulaic plotting of melodrama is the fact that the values according to which we judge whether a character is good or bad are never called into question. It's at most a matter of suspense as to whether a figure like Russell will turn toward the holy light or slide back into infernal darkness. In a mystery it's a matter of concealing the information of who the evil character is, but there's never any real question as to what constitutes good and bad in either case.

Romance often polarizes good and evil, too, but at its best the episodic structure gives it more space to develop its view of a universal system of meaning in which good and evil are made comprehensible and palpable to us. Melodrama always feels thinner to me than romance, probably because it's a theatrical mode requiring stripped-down, unified action. We understand that Russell undergoes a redemption in the course of the movie, but the context of what redemption means is scarcely developed at all, except in the negative sense of renouncing what we've watched him do. In melodrama we're urged to see evil as an identifiable force outside us to be cast out like a demon, ritualistically vanquished. It sure works out neatly. But say the head of the SIS were a secret crime lord and one of his lieutenants exposed him--how different would race relations in L.A. be as a result?