MOVIE REVIEW

This potboiler is a bit warmed-over.

By Mark Olsen, Special to The Times

Anyone who has ever wondered what became of the screenwriter for the Wesley Snipes potboilers "Murder at 1600" and "The Art of War" now has an answer, as Wayne Beach adds director to his résumé with the equally unconvincing "Slow Burn."

In a generic mid-size city, a power-hungry district attorney running for mayor tries to quash the potential firestorm of his top prosecutor (also his girlfriend) having just killed a man. Things unravel quickly and soon it seems a plot to bring down the D.A. has been masterminded by the city's mysterious top crimelord. Motives, allegiances and identities slip and flip faster than Beach can seem to credibly invent motives.

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The problem with twist-riddled, shifting-sands thrillers like this is they require the audience to be engaged, in the sense of actually caring about what happens. If the movie can't earn that interaction, which "Slow Burn" definitely does not, then it becomes nothing more than an empty-handed parlor trick. Add to the jumble an extremely wrong-headed riff on race that Beach tries to weave into the story and the film quickly moves from being merely dopey to the precipice of offensive.

Beach has assembled a group of performers that do their best to sell material that could never have seemed anything less than ridiculous, including Ray Liotta, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Taye Diggs. Rounding out the cast are the less impressive, or perhaps just more confused, Mekhi Phifer, James Todd Smith ("a.k.a. LL Cool J") and Jolene Blalock.

While the press material for "Slow Burn" throws out the C-word ("Chinatown"), the more apparent jumping-off point here is "The Usual Suspects." The endless interrogation room scenes, the crimelord with a secret identity, the trickster clues hidden throughout all seem to come directly from the Keyser Soze playbook. Beach underlines pieces of the puzzle along the way by flashing back to earlier mentions whenever something comes up again, as if he doesn't trust that the audience is either smart enough or involved enough to pick up on the clues. Beach's storytelling tactics, much like the film as a whole, would simply be annoying if they weren't also borderline insulting.

"Slow Burn." MPAA rating: R for sexuality, violence and language. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. In general release.