Precious few melodramatic movies show virtuosity to match Donizetti's and Verdi's. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) certainly does; it's an irresistibly gaudy piece of expert craftsmanship (which like Training Day casts the star as the bad cop). And Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) has a shooting style and editing rhythm so electrifyingly alert that many sensible people have detected political profundity in it. Still, I'd say that as to its purported subject matter, a melodrama, with its simplifications and emotional primitivism, is always going to be at some basic level a piece of crap. The artistry of its technical means enables Z, like Lucia and Forza, to overcome its literary deficiencies; it is what you might call a masterpiece of crap. Dark Blue is not comparably masterful. Shelton's follow-up feature Hollywood Homicide, a ramshackle, casually tossed-off comedy about the LAPD that never expects you to take its melodramatic plot seriously, is the better movie.

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Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.