The Ninth Gate

Herald rating: * *

Cast: Johnny Depp, Emmanuelle Seigner, Lena Olin, Frank Langella.

Director: Roman Polanski.

Running time: 133 mins.

Rating: R16 (violence, sex scenes).

Screening: Village, Rialto cinemas.

Review: Peter Calder

Do collectors of rare books really read them one-handed while smoking and slurping Scotch?

Do they squash them open on restaurant tables while they eat? Or sling them, casually unwrapped, into army surplus shoulder-bags while they hump groceries home through a New York downpour?

These questions kept intruding as I struggled through this laboured diabolical thriller by the director of 1974's sublime Chinatown.

The cavalier abuser of valuable volumes is Dean Corso (Depp), a book detective hired by the wealthy collector Boris Balkan (Langella) to establish whether his is the only authentic copy of the The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows, a 15th-century Lonely Planet for the underworld.

Corso's quest takes him to Spain and France, where he attracts the malevolent attentions of various rivals and becomes more than a little suspicious of his employer's bona fides.

The film adapts Spanish novelist Arturo Perez Reverte's The Dumas Club - by all accounts a learned and complicated literary rumination - into a relatively straightforward whodunnit. But it's one in which visual conceptions too often triumph over narrative coherence.

Littered with knowing references to his own pictures (a vampish Lena Olin's cigarette case routine recalls Faye Dunaway's in Chinatown) and to demonological commonplaces (the security code in Balkan's apartment includes a 666) as well as visual trickery (a pair of identical twin Spanish book dealers is played by a single actor) but much of the mystery seems more wilful than witty.

And the pyrotechnic ending, which tries to achieve the horror of the climax in Rosemary's Baby, is more than faintly embarrassing.

With his last film, an adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's gripping chamber piece Death and the Maiden, Polanski seemed to have put a wobbly career back on track. This, though, runs mostly off the rails.