The original novel by Michael Connelly seemed to have been written with a movie in mind: one of those overblown, overheated thrillers whose villain is a taunting, string-pulling, game-playing archfiend of boogeyman dimensions. Clint Eastwood (cited, for unspecified services, in the book's acknowledgments) has made a better movie of it than might have been expected. It is a handsome one, for a start, clean and polished, the first cinematography credit for Tom Stern, after a lengthy apprenticeship under Eastwood's regular cameraman, Jack Green, who had followed a similar path before he supplanted Bruce Surtees. But as a literary makeover (in the hands of Brian Helgeland, the man who did the laborious job on L.A. Confidential), any improvement must be laid to emotional flatness and half-heartedness. The shrill rhetoric on the page, the almost fire-and-brimstone fulminations on "evil," thus got toned down to the familiar Eastwood whisper. (Hardly the miraculous, water-into-wine, sow's-ear-into-silk-purse transmutation of The Bridges of Madison County.) If the actor himself appears old, slow, tired, and short of breath, those qualities go well in the part of a retired FBI profiler -- twenty years older than the one in the book -- with a newly transplanted heart. He agreeably allows himself to be addressed as "Pops," to be manhandled by a strapping Russian immigrant, to be photographed with an inch-wide trench running lengthwise down his torso. And he keeps putting a hand to his chest, a quasi-Napoleonic gesture, in the manner of an overindulgent diner uncertain as to whether he's feeling heartburn or coronary. Along with all that, though, he lacks something in the way of oomph at the moments of major revelation. No one except maybe Jimmy Stewart, in the entire history of American cinema, has been better than Eastwood at the silent articulation of moral outrage, disgust, disdain. To repeat: has been. Now, even the boogeyman cannot quite get his eye to widen or his lip to curl. With Jeff Daniels, Wanda De Jesús, Tina Lifford, Paul Rodriguez, Anjelica Huston. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd