'I AM THE NIGHT'............CHINATOWN-LITE

I Am The Night (2019)    .......damn.......we were so prepared to love this......

                  Just the thought of it got our juices flowin'.......sleazy, corrupt,  racism-stricken 1965 Los Angeles.....criss-crossed with the infamous, unsolved 'Black Dahlia' murder of the 1940's, where a struggling young actress was found horribly mutilated.........hoo boy!

                   We shouldn't have gotten our hopes too high.........coming from cable network TNT, who gave us that incoherent, stillborn costume parade, "The Alienist"......

                    "I Am The Night", presented in 6 hour long episodes, is equally incoherent......in six hours of storytelling, it never figures out whose story it's telling........or why.

                     But unlike the completely unwatchable "Alienist", this fiction-based-on-true-crime tale gets rescued by Chris Pine's wild, bravura performance.  He's a spectacular one-man show in this.......and he should make room on his shelf for a  hugely deserved Emmy......

                    Playing a drugged-up, burned out PTSD-afflicted Korea war vet, Pine's Jay Singletary barely ekes out a living as a seedy freelance journalist. Poking into the lives of the rich and well-connected earns him regular beatings at the hands L.A. cops......

                    In a parallel storyline, deer-in-the-headlights teen Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) after being raised by her adoptive black mother, discovers she's the granddaughter L.A. socialite Dr. George Hodel. (Jefferson Mays). Hodel, for all his wealthy trappings, is a loathsome psychotic sadist.......not to mention the un-indicted but thoroughly suspected murderer of the Black Dahlia.

                     After a few episodes, Singletary and Fauna's stories finally intersect........but all the series' subsequent scenes never find a single purpose or focus.......they're randomly stitched together, sometimes energized by Pine's startling, take-no-prisoners performance.

                    The show's creators throw everything into the mix.......the Watts riots, a side trip to Hawaii and even drag in the famous WTF plot twist from "Chinatown".......but the show seems to have no idea where it's going......until its forced to finally wrap things up in the sixth and final episode.

                    India Eisley's Fauna wanders through the series like a dazed Alice In Sleazyland......(except when, out of character, she suddenly becomes efficient at helping Singletary dispose of a dead body)..........and strangely, Eisley affects some kind of unidentifiable accent......(we're guessing it's Eisley's idea of what a white girl raised by a black mother would sound like.....we think....)  Stranger still, though this plays out in 1965,  her wardrobe stays anchored in the 1950's, outfitting her like an extra from 'Grease' or one of the original Mouseketeers........

                    The show ends up as a rickety,slapped together thing, with not a single moment's thought put into constructing its plot.......(or making its point either).......but Chris Pine grabs this shaggy, shuffling enterprise by its throat and by the sheer force of his talented work, gives it the illusion that it's telling a coherent tale.........(the "Alienist" had no such performance in it, so you can see what a difference it makes.....)

                      2 stars (**), solely for Pine. Somebody give this guy a series or a film that worthy of him......