So (Stacy Keach) dressed up as the 1940s' most stylish detectives (in the end of the 1980s?!) and went through a living hell of murders, betrayals, backstabbing, where the truth had too many faces to the extent that you couldn't (or shouldn't) recognize it!
As a TV stuff and fluff, this movie got it all. It sets you successfully on your seat to end any voice for your thinking. Don't you get smart and try to find out anything. It had been manufactured to give you nothing but loss of time, under the name of crime movie in the old fashion way yet weaker, but again and again who cares or should care? It might give you a chance to meditate on: modern life as assured ride of endlessly unstoppable decay, the certain stubbornness, violence, and criminality that you need to get through it.
However, the shameless confusion that they cleverly made here would give you the tedium. The sequences run on the screen extremely forcedly, non-understandable, so it may push you to call the whole thing off, if you're a fan of the genre or not. For all the time, your intelligence will need a fine long apology that you'll never get, as torrents of surprises, twists, or even totally gratis ambiguous situations continue. The determination to be darkly dark could effect ridiculously on you. It seems like strange competition concerning Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe cases, which challenges you: Can you catch on anything? In fact, it has the ability to make you ask not who the criminal is, but what the crime was?!!
Though, don't deny that it has: nice moody music; (Harlem Nocturne) got me every time. The lion presence of (Stacy Keach), with few memorable moments. Sharp funny lines like: "I'm a boxer" / "Yeah, but I didn't know you while you're standing!". The colorful atmosphere is like most of the 1980s' movies and TV shows: soft and vivid (despite that this is so dark noir!). And originally that script which boldly presented a chain of the most distracting unattached crimes in such a loyalty and fast pace that brilliantly made you wholly incapable of tracking down anything, as well as contributed in clearing the meaning of the word "illogical" in the dictionary of the genre as: diverting diversion.
It was childishly entreating to see and follow (Keach) as the steel (Hammer) in the 1940s' looks and the 1980s' world, albeit the 1980s equipments are scarcely being in cadre. Traveling into future like that was, despite any logical objection, a distinct joy; only in the 1980s I think. Although the complete entertainment here wasn't complete, but sure this kind of weird touches and atmosphere could at least attract a particular audience to fulfill certain dreams. The movie's personality was exhausted out of its heavy ironies and oddities, but that's the point I suppose, Murder Takes All, and movie to murder all of your thinking for 90 minutes.
It is generally a kind-of-its-own classic. As the pulp TV, and at its perfect "too much" condition too. So, don't strain your brain, it's brainless.
