Across eight episodes this summer, Steve Zaillian and Richard Price showed there was lots of new life to be found in the crime procedural with “The Night Of.” Going deep into life behind bars and finding new perspectives exploring the machinations of law and order, the limited series also provided a breakout role for Riz Ahmed as the complicated unreliable protagonist around which the drama swirled. So the prospect of Ahmed leading another genre effort with the feature length “City Of Tiny Lights” was certainly enticing, but its TIFF bow in the wake of HBO’s acclaimed series only highlights the shortcomings of a movie that is continually beneath the talents of the fast rising actor.
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“I deal in secrets. I dig them up or I bury them,” says PI Tommy Akhtar (Ahmed) in voiceover in the opening moments of the film, which makes clear its noir aspirations. But that not-so-hard-boiled dialogue hardly sizzles, and that voiceover pretty much disappears, only to surface again a couple more times. It’s first of many undercooked elements of “City Of Tiny Lights,” which tries desperately to ride hard on mood and attitude but struggles to find a story worth telling. It’s not for lack of trying.
When a hooker named Melody (Cush Jumbo) walks into Tommy’s London office with a case —find her missing roommate and colleague in the trade— he readily takes the gig. But as it always goes in these kinds of stories, a different kind of trouble arrives in the form of Shelley (Billie Piper), a former flame who has returned into his life, bringing with her memories of their shared tragedy, one that will be revealed in flashback over the course of the movie, yet has little to do with the mainline mystery.
As for that whodunit, it’s rather rote material, feeling like a beefed up episode of “Law & Order,” weaving a story that eventually involves drugs, shady real estate deals and Islamic extremism. And while even the famed crime series occasionally tipped a pointed commentary about the real life events that inspired various storylines, there’s no such attempt here, which is particularly head-scratching. Based on the book by Patrick Neate, who also wrote the screenplay, the filmmakers are solely interested in creating a particular kind of throwback, gumshoe focused flick. And that would be fine if they had done anything we haven’t seen before.
While he might be younger than Jake Gittes or Sam Spade and is certainly operating in a much more ethnically diverse world, Tommy Akhtar otherwise fits the profile of your standard movie PI. A few punches or a good beating won’t impede his work on a case, his relationship with women tends to be troubled or complicated, he’s got an easy handle on the bottle, and he’s got connections and friends in all the right places to get the information he needs. That amounts to a friendly rapport with Detective Cal Donnelly (Danny Webb), while local kid Avid (Mohammed Ali Amiri, constantly sucking his teeth to extreme distraction) lends his tech skills to Tommy, who operates a private detective business in 2016 but doesn’t know what it means to “decrypt.” These are all familiar ingredients, but none receive any kind of reinvention.
This lack of inspiration also carries over to the look of the movie. Directed by Pete Travis (“Dredd,” “Vantage Point”) and lensed by Felix Wiedemann, the picture seems to betray the latter’s TV resume (“Mr. Selfridge,” “Misfits”) and the pair are content with letting “cloudy” and “rainy” set the atmosphere. Even as the main plot eventually shifts toward the Islamic community, there’s no sense of immersion into that milieu, nor even London in general, with the story seeming like it could be taking place anywhere, with only certain accents betraying where it all unfolds. And while Ahmed swaggers around like a seasoned private dick, there’s only so he much he can do when forced to chew on some particularly gamey dialogue while trying to energize the mysteriousness of a case that offers few suspects and has a fairly predictable outcome. Perhaps the array of characters read better on the page, but it all feels slight in execution, particularly when half of the running time is spent on Tommy’s past and what unfolded between himself and Shelley. Combine all that with a particularly lackluster sense of urgency and pacing, and you have film that offers few reasons for investment.
With “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” on the horizon, Ahmed is about to become famous on a global scale, and many in Hollywood are already well aware of his tremendous talent (this year has also seen the actor in “Jason Bourne,” and “Una,” which is making the festival rounds). “City Of Tiny Lights” can’t help but feel like it’s already set to be a curio on the actor’s CV, a pre-fame gig that served as good exercise for much better material that’s surely on the horizon. [D]
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