Traditional hard-boiled private-eye stuff, set in the traditional time period (1948), but a little off the traditional beaten path (in the black community of South-Central L.A.). With this workmanlike adaptation of the first installment in Walter Mosley's series of Easy Rawlins detective novels, writer-director Carl Franklin graduates from low-budget independence (One False Move) to the major-studio mainstream, and with no loss of modesty. The selection of period clothes and cars is excellent without ever being excessive. The camera generally elects to shun scenery and spectacle and to cozy up to the actors (Franklin is himself a former actor), maintaining a sense both of humanity and of humility, as well as a sense of obliviousness to the Big Picture. In other words, a sense of close identification with the protagonist. The follow-the-leads, connect-the-dots plotline, uncluttered by flash and crash, has no real snags or snarls, but no real pull either. And the casting of Jennifer Beals, even if immune from accusations of "cheating," tends to give away a major revelation. The filmmaker seems in some ways too honest, too modest, for his own good. He certainly retains from the Mosley prose the distinctively and instructively black voice, and protects it from the braggadocio and self-aggrandizement of the "blaxploitation" thrillers of the not too distant past (Black Gunn, Black Eye, etc.). Easy Rawlins, a nonprofessional P.I. in this baptismal adventure, is much more Common Man than Mythic Hero. And Denzel Washington stays truer to the times in this role -- truer to the character's powerlessness and vulnerability -- than he stayed, for example, in the role of the precocious firebrand in Glory. And even as Easy is no paragon of the action hero, his confederate -- the gold-toothed, itchy-trigger-fingered Mouse (a high-profile part for the low-profile Don Cheadle) -- is a paragon of nothing less than the psychopathic goon, the forefather, if you please, of the ghetto gangbanger: "Easy, if you didn't want him killed, why'd you leave him with me?" (1995) — Duncan Shepherd