I'm coming at this as a fan of Kathleen Turner, the V.I. Warshawski series and of my home city of Chicago. This movie simply blew it.
The casting, at least, was perfect. Turner is perfectly cast as V.I. The voice, the look, the attitude, everything. She perfectly captures the character. Even the rest of the casting is good. Jay O. Sanders perfectly fits Murray (A red-headed Elliot Gould according the books) and Dennehy is Bobby Mallory.
The problem is script and direction. They took bits and pieces from at least four different books and threw them together, badly. They watered down V.I. (tho Turner did a hell of a job of working through it). The movie loses its way at the end. It's just a mess. The directing was half-hearted. And they never got much of the character of Chicago, which is a major part of V.I. herself.
This could have been a great movie. V.I. is one of the great unsung female characters in mystery fiction. Chicago is one of the great cities of the world. And the stories in the series are full and complex. And this movie wasn't any of it.
It's good for the hardcore Kathleen Turner fans. She is the best part of this movie and manages to get the character to show through the bad dialog. But this movie could have been so much more. Hopefully a good adaption could be done at some point.
