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But once in a while one of these movies escapes and makes its way to a DVD release, and such is the case with Murder in Greenwich - a movie that manages to be mindless, aimless and boring with an effortless consistency. Directed by former genre filmmaker Tom McLoughlin, this one's every bit the ABC Sunday Night Movie you'd expect, only not one the network would choose to broadcast during Sweeps Week.

We all remember Mark Fuhrman, right? That globally humiliated racist detective who got his 15 minutes of infamy during the O.J. Simpson trial? Yeah, him. It seems after that such an auspicious debut in the national spotlight, Fuhrman fancied himself a real-live Columbo and headed off to a tiny little white-bread burg in New England. Why? Because Fuhrman was intent on researching a murder both 22 years old and long since considered unsolvable.

So essentially what we got is: one amazingly familiar extended episode of CSI, mixed with the stunningly uninteresting revelation that -hey- ultra-rich white folks can cover up small-town murders if they really want to, plus we're inundated with an endless voice-over-from-beyond-the-grave (courtesy of our long-dead-teenage-girl-murder-victim) AND most irritating of all components: a limp-wristed redemption tale of a known racist and perjurer who desperately wants people to forgive him and therefore produces a movie in which he's the misunderstood hero.

Christopher Meloni does the best he can with an irretrievably unsympathetic role, while Robert Forster (clearly not riding much of a post-Tarantino resurgence) capably anchors a few of the project's less yawn-infested sequences. But both actors are cast adrift in overstarched TV-flick dialogue, overbaked red herrings and those ever-annoying burps in the narrative that arrive when your "film" is produced with commercial breaks in mind.

Keep in mind that Fuhrman travels to Greenwich not to discover the murderer, but to write a BOOK about the 22-year-old slaying of a beautiful young girl, and you'll have a clear indication of how civil-minded this ghoulish affair really is.

That trip led to a novel, and said novel was translated into this movie, thus proving the long-suspected and sad truth that ANYone in America can get rich so long as they end up on TV somewhere.

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originally posted: 05/02/04 17:39:01
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