The script is lumpy all the way through. Russell's big confession scene at the end is, by Shelton's admission in a March 2002 interview with Carlo Cavagna of AboutFilm, crammed with back story because they "couldn't figure out another way to do it". Lolita Davidovich as Russell's wife has several hopeless scenes, one in which she has to act unhappy and then explain what we've just seen in a theatrical aside, as if we'd miss why she drinks, and another one in which she peculiarly reads an overexplicit farewell note to Russell out loud to him.

The African-American characters who fight the good fight are so incorruptible they don't seem rooted in the world the way the compromised whites do. Which isn't to say they're very appealing. Ving Rhames in the nearly unwritten part of the upright assistant chief is awfully ominous and brooding for the representative of uncompromising morality. The movie acknowledges one flaw in him--adultery--but mitigates it in a hilariously crisp list of legalisms. I detected a few more flaws: he's about as humorless, self-righteous, and impolitic a police chief as you could imagine. Though he's meant to be utterly pure of motive he comes across like Captain Ahab, and I could never figure out whether this was intended by the makers or something Rhames did because he had to do something.

Michael Michele plays his assistant and she has the very worst scene in the movie, the one in which the moralistic underpinnings of the melodrama are made plain--she tells Russell to his face he's evil and hopes he goes to hell. She's worth watching despite this because she has something like Faye Dunaway's high-tension glamour. Her failing may be Angela Bassett's, however, which is to go for intensity no matter what the context. I hope we have better opportunities in the future to find out.

Certainly, most 19th-century Italian operas are melodramas and while it's a handicap it doesn't keep you from swooning over the virtuosity of the composers, conductors, musicians, and, above all, the singers. Donizetti's librettists took Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, a great novel about what was lost and gained in the historical transition from a feudal aristocratic system that rewarded valor and a modern legal system of political representation and recordation of property rights, and turned it into a corny melodrama that inverted much of what Scott intended. (It becomes a tribute to doomed chivalric heroism.) But listening to Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti as the ill-fated lovers in Lucia di Lammermoor is a transporting experience nonetheless.

I've overstated my case somewhat to make the point. A melodramatic narrative structure doesn't always compromise the subject of the piece entirely; for instance, the libretto to Verdi's La Forza del destino, another opera about an implacable brother who destroys his innocent sister and her misunderstood lover, is sprawling and absurd and yet manages to lodge a sincere protest against the concept of vendetta that is central to its own plot. (Of course, it does this by ascribing the melodramatic outlook to Don Carlo; that's what makes him the relentless bad guy.)