The Singing Detective is a film about a guy coming to terms with his past and his problems in a very painful, hostile way.  It's also pulpy...and it's a musical.  These are things that would not ordinarily go together, and I'm not sure they really bring out the best in each other here.  A good potboiler is one thing, but gumshoes who burst into song is something else entirely.  The same kind of theory applied to, say, Cop Rock.

Detective, which is based on a wildly popular six-hour British miniseries penned by the late Dennis Potter, swaps '40s London for Chicago in the '50s in terms of setting, while replacing BAFTA winner Michael Gambon's Phillip Marlowe with walking punchline Robert Downey Jr. and his appropriately named Dan Dark.  The angry Dark, a pulp writer, spends the entire film - physically, at least - within the confines of a hospital where he's being treated for a rare skin infection which makes it look like he has second-degree burns from head to toe.  Dark refuses to take painkillers (oh, the irony) and, because of this, he can only lay immobile in his bed and let his thoughts get the better of him.

Because of Dark's state of mind, we're not sure what parts of Detective are real and which exist only in Dark's gloomy head.  Complicating matters is a possible third scenario in which Dark is imagining characters from his novels.  These figments include a hitman version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Adrien Brody and Jon Polito), a whorish mother (Carla Gugino) and a regular whore (Carla Gugino again), a masturbatory nurse (Katie Holmes), and a wife (Robin Wright Penn) who might be screwing another guy (Jeremy Northam) while they both try to screw Dark out of the movie rights to one of his novels.

Sounds pretty nutty, right?  And then, every once in a while, the walls roll away and people start belting out period hits like "At the Hop" and "Mr. Sandman" (don't worry – they're only lip-synching).  The song-and-dance numbers are light, even though they're fully rooted in fanciful paranoia and bewildering delusion, unlike Dancer in the Dark or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  As if that weren't enough, Dark makes occasional visits to the hospital's shrink (Mel Gibson, trying way too hard for a Best Supporting Actor nod – Detective was financed by his Icon Productions) who uses some unorthodox treatment techniques on our boy.

Slowly, Dark starts getting better, both physically and spiritually (making us wonder if the skin condition wasn't all psychosomatic).  But by then I stopped caring about Dark's problems and focused on my watch, which suddenly seemed to be moving counter-clockwise.  Maybe there were problems hacking Potter's epic story into a 110-minute film, though the thought of Detective running another four hours makes me want to burn down a church.  Downey's performance is good, but it gets muddled in its ridiculous surroundings.  I will say this for Detective: It made me feel nearly as delusional as Dark was supposed to be.  That's got to count for something.  And far be it from me to knock a film featuring a Katie Holmes handjob.

1:49 -

for strong sexual content, language and some violence