Since the late 1990s, Dario Argento has been a director in a state of serious decline, a development made even more crippling due to the fact that, at one time, this now-elderly filmmaker played a highly influential role in mapping out the cinematic landscape of Italian horror and mystery (dubbed "giallo" after its roots in seedy paperback crime novels). It has been 15 years since his most noteworthy feature, 1995's underrated "Stendhal Syndrome," and up until now, he has been frantically trying to recapture the flavor of his celebrated early works ("Suspiria"; "Profondo Rosso"; "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage"); problem is, the more frantically he tries, the more pathetic his efforts become. Despite its ironic title, "Giallo" owes less to the heyday of seedy Spaghetti Thrillers and more to Argento's listless, lethargic latter-day efforts: an amalgam of poor script translation (and subsequent dubbing and sound sync), awkward performances, tortoise-paced exposition, and unimpressive gore. There are threads of backstory that go maddeningly unexplored (instead of connecting the traumatic upbringings of the cop and killer, these are instead turned into throwaway details left to flit in the wind), and the film ends with an intended ambiguity that comes off (quite disastrously) as an apathetic, pseudo-art house shrug. Even the presence of the usually-reliable Adrien Brody cannot bring "Giallo" up from its low-rent depths; his performance a monosyllabic sleepwalk that, like Argento, never seems more than half-conscious.
Review of Giallo
