Midweek Mention... Zero Effect

Bad Dads Film Review

ZERO EFFECT takes the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle short story "A Scandal in Bohemia" and updates it in a 1998 comedy slash mystery from Jake Kasdan which Sidey loves and I had never seen before. Bill Pullman is tortured soul Daryl Zero; the world's greatest private investigator and a recluse who will only be represented in public by his long-suffering assistant Arlo (Ben Stiller). Together, Zero and Arlo have solved some of the world's most bewildering criminal cases, including The Case Of The Man With Mismatched Shoelaces and The Case of the Hired Gun Who Made Too Many Mistakes. When wealthy businessman Gregory Stark (Ryan O Neal) hires the duo to find missing keys to a safety deposit box, Zero uncovers a secret involving Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens), a paramedic with a mysterious past, whilst also finding himself slowly falling in love with her.
Both the Downey Jr. SHERLOCK movies left me cold and beyond KNIVES OUT I would be hard pressed to name anything in this genre that's raised even a semi out of me recently so I'm probably not the best to review this because beyond the excellent opening 40 minutes where we are introduced to Zero and his world, I found the movie to be meandering and sometimes predictable during the actual mystery. A huge lack of chemistry between Pullman and Dickens doesn't help and the ending seems somehow both abrupt and overly long at the same time though Sidey will point to all the stuff that's good about it: the off kilter neo-noir aspects, Bill Pullman's magnetic performance, the pulpy mystery and surprising denouement so if you are a fan of the Sherlock Holmes mythos or the crime mystery genre and haven't seen this, you should absolutely check it out.

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