In fact, Patric portrays some of the best I'm-so-fucked-up emotions I've seen for a long while, effortlessly pissing on the turns other thesps like Ethan Hawke and Brad Pitt made in cop flicks. He's a great one for primal noises see. Jason Patric grunts and howls like no actor alive right now, except possibly for Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct, and it all kicks off with the first scene where *SPOILER* Patric, his undercover alias blown, is chasing after a lethal-syringe-wielding maniac who kills one innocent bystander and then grabs a toddler in a park. *SPOILER ENDS* Leading to two mighty fine banshee howls from Patric as he's torn between what he has to do on instinct and the consequences of his actions. Honestly, this sequence is so good (and there's a whole DVD extra devoted to it), I put it straight back on once the flick as a whole had finished - I don't think I've done that since Betty Blue.

From the interviews with Patric and Liotta it seems that the two went method on the ultra-cheap shoot, electing not to talk to each other outside of their scenes together. It lends the subsequent screen time the kind of tension that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro fumbled around so badly for in their one scene in Heat. So tense are some of the standoffs (come, you knew there'd be lots of those) that at one point I actually thought Liotta was going to rip off Patric's head and shit down his neck - I don't know, there was something in his eyes when he caught Patric questioning someone he shouldn't have been, maybe Jason asked Liotta what he'd been doing since 1990.

What's it about? Well, Liotta's partner has been killed, no-one's saying nothin', and Patric is just the right last-chance loser to put on the case. Everything looks really cold (Detroit-as-filmed-in Toronto), and you know the extremes of temperature always look boss on film. People don't finish their sentences, there are long pauses in dialogue, the violence scares the beejesus out of you, and Patric carries off a beanie hat with studied aplomb. Dirty mother probably didn't even take it off his bonce for the whole shoot.