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As a fan of DePalma and the brilliant James Ellroy novel (as well as being a Dahlia buff myself), I have to say that I was really disappointed by this on-screen adaptation, which is a shame because I had been anticipating its release for so long.

Not only is the Bucky Bleichart character devoid of any of the "hard boiled" characteristics that made him great in print, but the entire noir persona is sucked dry and strangely missing here, replaced instead by a Hollywood-molded white-knight everyman who is on a quest to "do good" - hardly the figure that Ellroy wrote of the corrupt cop who comes out of the story broken, privy to the darker side of human nature but willing to play its game.

In fact, the story itself is practically ruined in this film - vital parts of the book were left out, smashed together to allow shaky continuity, characters missing, characters added, holes never accounted for - it's just a mess. Stylistically, it looks good - being reminiscent of another Ellroy adaptation, 1997's fantastic "L.A. Confidential" directed by Curtis Hanson. But where Hanson's film accommodates Ellory's multitude of plot subtleties nicely, DePlama fails miserably. What a shame that it had to ruin this classic noir book, and the infamous and intriguing Hollywood Dahlia legend.

I was greatly disappointed by this film. Loved the first two - but the liberties they took with the third one were a little ridiculous. I mean, I knew it was gonna be a bad idea for them to try to tackle the Dark Pheonix saga, and boy was I right. But that's not even my biggest complaint ... the whole movie seems like it was put together last minute insofar as the writing was concerned. They tried to pack too much story into a 2-hour movie and the result was a shoddy, easy-wrap up, soulless strip of loose ends that didn't allow enough time for characters to breath. The saddest thing was that its abundance of pointless, multiple story lines cut into the much-anticipated action time. The result was negation on all fronts: it killed both the story and the action, rendering the entire movie anti-climatic and completely pointless. I mean, if you're going to flounder in story, at least give us the nerd porn action sequences we want as an easy fallback, right? But no... I mean, why didn't Wolverine at least get to go back for seconds with Juggernaut? Was it really so hard not to deny us that one? And barely any Colosus, instead they wasted waaaaay to much time on useless characters like Iceman and Angel, which simply amounted to a waste of celluloid. I'll put it this way, it's a sad day when the Beast becomes one of the shining moments of an x-men movie.