Trixie

An interestingly mishandled amalgam of film noir detective story and quirky, melancholy comedy, Trixie stars Emily Watson as a coy, hapless casino security guard with a 5th grade education, delusions of grandeur about her detective abilities and an endless supply of malapropisms. The slaughtered syntax gimmick gets old quick, but Watson speaks such volumes of character with the slightest inflections that she almost carries the film through its hard-to-follow plot about the murder of a strung-out, washed-up lounge singer (Lesley Ann Warren) that's connected to a greedy land developer (Will Patton) and a crooked politician (Nick Nolte). The picture plays kind of like a cheapie Twin Peaks crossed with a game of Mad Libs, but the real problem is that even with her misfiring synapses and mangled syntax, Trixie still makes more sense than anyone else or anything else in the movie. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)