MBunge This attempt at creating an inner city version of The Usual Suspects, complete with its own ghetto Keyser Soze, flounders about in a Dead Sea of expository dialog and flashbacks before beaching itself upon a conclusion that doesn't make a lick of logical or dramatic sense. Writer/director Wayne Beach is so caught up in his own supposed cleverness that he forgets some basic elements of storytelling, resulting in a film that will bore the pants off you.Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) is the District Attorney for Los Angeles who also happens to be running for mayor. While being interviewed by Vanity Fair journalist Ty Trippin (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Cole is informed that his top gang prosecutor just shot a man. Norah Timmer (Jolene Blalock) says the guy was a stalker who broke into her house and raped her. Cole believes Norah, at least partly because the two of them are secretly lovers, until a man calling himself Luther Pinks (LL Cool J) walks into the police department with a completely different story. He says the dead man's name is Isaac Duperde (Mekhi Phifer) and that Isaac and Norah were lovers. Pinks spins a tale of Norah dragging Isaac deeper and deeper into…well, it's never really clear why she does any of the things she does or why Isaac goes along or what it's all supposed to result in. Even after watching the mystery be revealed at the end, I still don't know why any of it actually happened.The nonsensical scheme does involve a multi-million dollar real estate deal and a gang leader named Danny Luden that Cole is obsessed with convicting even though he's never seen Danny's face or knows who he is. The whole thing revolves around something that's going to happen at 5 AM and, believe it or not, the confusion over whether Norah is a white woman pretending to be black or a black woman who can pass for white. The whole thing wraps up in the extremely rare quintuple twist which is so empty, superficial and stupid that it demonstrates why only morons think they can slap 5 plot twists on the end of their film.Slow Burn starts out violating the first rule of filmmaking and just goes on from there. The rule is "show, not tell" and this story is entirely built and carried out by characters telling other characters things. It has multiple narrators leading the audience through multiple flashbacks interrupted only by more conversations in the present. The main character in all the flashbacks is Isaac, but we're never shown or even told anything about what kind of man he's is or why we should care about him. Ford Cole is the main character in the present, but he's so passive he might as well be a walking doormat. The secret agenda of Danny Luden is also so blatantly red flagged that even a blind and deaf person would notice it. And all Jolene Blalock does in this movie is briefly show off both her boobs and how bad her hair looks in corn rows.Slow Burn is a movie where people you don't care about tell stories about other people you don't care about until springing a surprise ending you still don't care about. Unless you're a big Star Trek geek and want to see T'Pol's hooters, there's no reason to waste your time with this film.

galaxydude14 I had not heard of this movie when me and my friend picked it up at Blockbuster. It was between this and Be Kind Rewind and fortunately we chose this movie. Ray Liotta plays a district attourney running for mayor when his DA is raped by a supposed psychotic music store clerk and then murders him. Liotta is taken on a roller coaster of a mystery where you don't know who is telling the truth and if everyone is who they say they are. There are so many twists and turns that it becomes confusing at points but it all adds up to the ending which relieves your confusion. I haven't heard of Jolene Blalock but she is excellent in her role as the supposedly raped(was she or wasn't she?) DA who may have some tricks up her sleeve. The only thing i had a problem with was some of the dialouge. LL Cool J's ramblings about everything smelling like food was a bit strange. Other than that it was awesome

ccthemovieman-1 This wore out its welcome about 40 minutes into the movie and after the halfway point, about 10 minutes later, I totally didn't care if our girl here was innocent or guilty. The story just became plodding.I am so glad it wasn't just me, that the first review I see here - Mermaidbronze - felt the same way I did. I'll put it in simple terms: this film was not as "smart" and "clever" as it thought it was. In fact, it was stupid because it committed the ultimate sin for making a movie - it bored the hell out of its audience, and an audience that includes some "smart people" who can figure things out. A convoluted movie is just that, and not fun to watch no matter what any viewer's IQ might be.Movies that revolve around the big question "Did he/she kill the person or not" are either extremely interesting and involving or the opposite. I found it un-involving, and when you don't care about the characters, then you don't care who's innocent or guilty and the film loses all effectiveness.This movie was filmed in 2003 but not released until this year - four years later! Maybe they knew it was a turkey.

seanymphette This is not about concentration. Nor is it about having enough film savvy or cleverness to figure out obscure themes and subplots in films, after all, some of us are David LYNCH fans and enjoy decoding and detangling films as though they are mazes. Those films are at least vibrant and colorful enough to maintain the interest of a BINGO audience. They have characterization, plot, action, theme, etc. We have become accustomed to the complexity of flashbacks and out-of-sequence story lines. We loved "Pulp Fiction", "Memento", "Traffic", and "21 Grams", but a film should not be so chaotic, disorderly, and cluttered with digressive subplots that you can't determine the main theme of the film. When films do this, they are simply exercises in mental masturbation for a self aggrandizing filmmaker and are not interesting to the rest of us. We are not all falling asleep because we have Attention Deficit Disorder. Some of us are really laid-back and low key, with excellent concentration skills, and are detail oriented to a fault. We are falling asleep because the film simply doesn't have any action to move it forward. Its boring, frustrating, and tedious. I mean after all, both Theoretical Mathmaticians and Avant-Garde Poets find what they do equally interesting, neither is more valid than the other. A film needs to be interesting enough to appeal to some audience within the range between them, this film is not, does not.