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This is the perfect role for Hackman as the aging sports star unable to find his role in life once the playing days are over. He is the accidental jock, too sensitive to play the stereotype and so finding no sense of belonging. He has become a detective but he is a bumbling amateur compared to a Philip Marlowe type. He is shy and hestitant and is frequently made to feel discomfort by the seedy, untrustworthy people he comes into contact with. He has none of Marlowe's self assurance. It begs the question why has he become a detective? Maybe it is partly due to his abandonment by his father who years later Hackman tracks down only to fail in confronting him. He is condemned to search for people to whom he is of no importance.

This idea of the lonely seeker is Hackman's own turf. His affable charm conveys a sense of a lifetime's wrongheaded idealism. In the wrong job, deluding himself, looking for a way out. Eventually, he is able to see clearly and see how his drifting has allowed the people around him to manipulate him in their games. Unlike many of this film's peers such as 'Chinatown', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Long Goodbye', we are not left to be slightly repulsed by the lead actor's ways. Hackman plays the everyman character as an affable, amateur sleuth whose hestitancy and chronic lack of commitment give him a fallibility more recognizable to an audience.

She was great as Clint's daughter in Absolute Power and he has used her again in one of this film's key roles as Sean Penn's wife. She is as good as a ruthless pragmatist like this as she was as the warm hearted single mum in 'You Can Count on Me'. Like the possibly undervalued 'Bloodwork', this film raises the question of evil finding its way past even good intentions. In the former, Clint's much reported good deeds as a cop instigated the crimes and attentions of a obsessive stalker/serial killer and here Linney chillingly argues that anything is justified if it is in the name of self preservation. She is wrong but no doubt she is the film's winner.

This was very disappointing considering it was a Coen brothers's film. Clooney and Zeta Jones were charmless as the might-be lovers and I couldn't care less about such morally reprehensible people. Geoffrey Rush was more funny and likeable than the leads in his early cameo and I wish he had been a greater force in the film. As an obvious renewal of screwball comedy it was fatally compromised by the inclusion of such degraded personalities as to make it in the worst of bad taste.