Maybe I've just seen too many episodes of The Practice, but the whodunit portion of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River was so easy to crack, I was able to do so while listening to Game Four of the Red Sox-Yankees ALCS in one ear. That can't possibly be a good thing.  With over an hour to go in the film, I had the ending all mapped out in my head (as well as the exact number of Tim Wakefield's strikeouts – I'm a multi-tasker), which left me teetering on the edge of boredom as I started looking for things to complain about in this review.

River, in case you've missed the commercials, is the overly praised 24th film directed by Eastwood (hey, if Tarantino can get away with it, why not Clint?).  The story is based on Dennis Lehane's novel about three friends from a blue-collar section of Boston.  A disturbing prologue shows the trio as boys, carving their names into a freshly poured sidewalk after playing street hockey.  A car pulls up and a man gets out, flashing a badge and hollering about destruction of municipal property.  He drags young Dave into the car and speeds off, as Sean and Jimmy watch in shock.  Dave is sexually abused for four days but manages to escape.

Twenty-five years later, only Sean (Kevin Bacon, Trapped) has been able to escape the old neighborhood.  He's a Massachusetts State Police detective called in to investigate a murder.  The victim happens to be the oldest daughter of ex-con Jimmy (Sean Penn, I Am Sam), who runs the area's convenience store.  One of the last people to see 19-year-old Katie (Emmy Rossum, Songcatcher) alive is Dave (Tim Robbins, The Truth About Charlie), who, perhaps not so coincidentally, came home that night to wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden, Casa de los Babys) with a bloody stomach wound and a story about beating a stranger to death.

So River isn't as much like Sleepers as its trailer may make it seem.  It's about loss and grieving and the brotherhood of grimy neighborhood street justice, and maybe even a little about fate, too.  Was Jimmy's first wife murdered because he was lucky enough to avoid the grip of child molestation?  Is Sean being dragged back to his old stomping grounds to fulfill some kind of weird destiny?  Could the reason Dave is constantly lit like some kind of Hammer horror film creature have anything to do with anything?  These are the kind of questions that will be running through your head if you crack the mystery too early.  I don't recommend doing so because I really liked River until this point, and everything that followed felt like a leaden exercise.

I'm certainly no genius, and for a while I thought I took the bait and was going to get bushwhacked during River's epilogue, especially with the way people have been gushing over the film the last few weeks.  But it was just a regular old epilogue, following the inevitable ending.  Actually, "regular" doesn't really describe the epilogue very well at all.  100% crap is a little more appropriate.  There's almost a light, happy feel to it, which is just bizarre considering how frigging dark the rest of the film is – so dark, in fact, that they had to name its only black character (Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix Reloaded) "Whitey."

Eastwood's direction is, as it has been since the back-to-back wonderment of Unforgiven and the painfully overlooked A Perfect World, all over the map. Some touches are quite effective, while others cause you to roll your eyes in the direction of your Timex.  If there's one thing you can count on from Eastwood, it's making a picture that seems a lot longer than it really is.  I'm not too sure that's a great quality to have when it comes to filmmaking.  Sex, maybe...filmmaking, never.  It's kind of a backhanded compliment when people say River is his best film in years, especially when you consider those years included Absolute Power and True Crime.  Lehane's book is adapted by Brian Helgeland, who did the same for Eastwood's Blood Work, and whose The Order was in theatres for fewer days than Gigli.

Luckily, Eastwood is bailed out by some very strong acting.  Notice I said "some," as the performances aren't quite as across-the-board wonderful as you may have been led to believe.  The highlight is Penn, who does enough raging to get Oscar's attention (though he'll be competing with himself, as Penn plays a very similar role in the upcoming 21 Grams).  Laura Linney (The Life of David Gale), who plays Jimmy's cousin, perpetrates what might be the most irritating accent of 2003, but at least her performance isn't as transparent as Robbins.   Or perhaps it just seems transparent when in such close proximity to Penn, who is now officially the best actor of his generation.

2:17 -

for language and violence