Greetings AICN, MiraJeff here with a look at one of the bigger films to debut at Tribeca, Lonely Hearts, a true crime story about a pair of star-crossed lovers who also happened to be cold-blooded killers. The film opens at Sing Sing prison in 1927, as a pair of take-no-shit Nassau detectives, Elmer “Buster” Robinson (John Travolta) and Charlie Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini) prepare for the executions of Raymond Fernandez (Jared Leto) and Martha Beck (Salma Hayek), AKA, the Lonely Hearts killers. We flash back to three years earlier as Robinson investigates the suspicious suicide of a woman found in a bathtub full of blood, the same place where his wife killed herself years before. Robinson has a teenage son who doesn’t know that his widowed father is now having a secret romance with a secretary (Laura Dern) at his precinct who understands what he’s going through

We’re first introduced to Raymond as he contacts rich old women through personal ads, feeding them the same old song and dance so he can swindle them out of their fortunes with his charming good looks. Raymond is one cool cat and he’s so smooth that he’s convinced himself he’s Don Juan. That’s when he meets his match in Martha, a beautiful young thing who as a victim of serial incest has become seriously unstable. When Fernandez gets pulled over for driving erratically while she’s giving him road head, or as she puts it, “schooling his little Raymond,” she takes care of business the Martha way and schools the cop’s little guy too. Martha is the catalyst that enables Raymond to get in touch with his inner evil. It’s not until Raymond meets her that he gets murder on his mind. From there, the detectives are hot on their trail and always a step behind until a lackluster silent ending that cribs more than a page from Se7en. I mean, the scene is so similar it’s distracting. You simply can’t ignore the likeness.

The performances are what keep the film afloat. Travolta does his tortured soul-shtick but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before from the guy. He’s nicknamed ‘Buster’ presumably because “he has more collars than a Chinaman dry cleaner,” as his partner so delicately phrases it. Speaking of which, Gandolfini doesn’t get nearly enough screen time and when is on screen, he’s certainly no Tony Soprano, although he does participate in some funny back and forth with Scott Caan. When Hayek coldly states that “Cops are like donuts; they’re no good without a hole in them,” Gandolfini snaps back, “women, too.” The stronger performances come from the villains, as Hayek is as good as she’s been in years. I never saw Frida, but this could be the best work she’s ever done. She’s sexy as a hell and more deadly than a black widow spider. Meanwhile, the film shows a completely different side of Jared Leto, with a receding hairline that makes him look like John Cazale. Leto really lets himself go for the role and hopefully this is just a preview of what he can do with the right role. I know we’re all anxious to see him as Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27. Whether he’s shooting cops and leaving them to die in a pool of their own blood in the middle of a street, or just combing what’s left of his hair in the mirror, Leto is in full-fledged sociopath mode.

On the whole, Robinson’s film is a serviceable pulp period piece, but it never truly takes off. It’s definitely not as good as films like Capote or LA Confidential, and hopefully, Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, which hits theaters later this year. Robinson was drawn to the material because his grandfather was the original detective assigned to the case. Robinson acknowledged that he was inspired by films such as The Honeymoon Killers and Deep Crimson, and as a result, Lonely Hearts is fairly dark for a Hollywood movie. For example, Martha kills a woman with an axe while she’s having sex with Raymond because he calls her “Kitty Kat,” his pet name for Martha. As the woman twitches on the floor bleeding from her skull, Martha makes him finish himself and he has to make her believe that he’s thinking about Martha while he does it. There’s also a distracting voice-over that feels too “written,” and sounds more like a pulp novel than someone’s actual thoughts. You could do better and you could do worse than Lonely Hearts, but who wants to settle for average mediocrity these days, when a movie ticket costs upwards of ten bucks? If true crime interests you, see it for Hayek because her performance is worth it. Robinson has The Last Full Measure with Morgan Freeman on the way. It’ll be interesting to see what he can do with a story that isn’t quite as personal to him. As a writer/director he shows promise in Lonely Hearts, but potential doesn’t merit and out and out recommendation.

That’ll do it for me, folks. I have a plethora of reviews to catch up on now that I’m settled in here in sunny California, home of the infamous Moriarty, who I hope to catch up with sometime soon. In other news, I was chosen to be one of the five film critics Uwe Boll will be fighting in Vancouver, so I’ve gotta start hitting the gym with a personal trainer or something, or else that guy is gonna knock my head clean off. Whatever, it’s all in the name of good fun and Ain’t It Cool-ness. I’ll be back in the coming days with a peek at Strangers With Candy. ‘Til then, this is MiraJeff signing off…