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.)
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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