THE TWO JAKES

This, the sequel to the classic Chinatown, sees Nicholson not only recreating his role as Jake Gittes, LA private eye, but also taking the helm as the movie's director. Unfortunately, despite a similarly convoluted plot, The Two Jakes is a pale imitation of Polanski's 1970s masterpiece.

Set after the Second World War, the story concerns Gittes (now much more successful than sixteen years previous) and the case he takes to help the film's other Jake (Harvey Keitel) determine if his wife is being unfaithful. As in Chinatown, things are nowhere near as simple as that, and events take over to the degree that Keitel's character pulls a gun and shoots his wife's lover. As it transpires the man was Keitel's business partner, whose will credits Keitel in the event of his death, it looks as though Gittes is again involved in a case where his client may be a lot less innocent than they first appeared.

All well and good, then, but The Two Jakes lacks the direction and the intensity of performance that made its predecessor such a landmark. Whereas Chinatown had an underlying oppressive and sinister feel, this movie has more of a subcurrent of camp melodrama (witness Gittes flying through the air after igniting a pocket of natural gas compared with his realistic and grotesque knife wound in Chinatown; or the distasteful sequence between him and Madeleine Stowe's character, compared with the electricity between him and Dunaway in the previous feature). Plotwise, Robert Townes - scriptwriter for both - has essentially rewritten Chinatown. Both plots revolve around crimes comitted concerning the city's natural resources (water before, oil here), and The Two Jakes makes so many references to the locations and characters of Chinatown that it is pointless seeing the sequel unless you have seen the first.

Nicholson's performance is a lot less tight than before, relying on voiceover here more than expression and acting abiliy to convey a scene or a mood. Sadly also, The Two Jakes has no femme fatale to speak of. Fay Dunaway's character in Chinatown was the classic example of the stereotype: beautiful, mysterious and doomed - and a vital part of the film. Here, the two main female characters are mere sketches, lacking any great emotional or pyshical impact and merely serving as plot devices to further the action.

To be fair to Nicholson, the look and feel of the film is good, with the sets and props all successfully recreating post-war LA; and the direction is not disastrous, being quite subtle and clever in parts. Sadly however, what we have here is a movie so completely overshadowed by its predecessor that it cannot hope to compete. Even were it not for Chinatown, The Two Jakes would merely be a competently-made adult thriller - not, as it aspires to be - a classic recreation of the film noir genre.

Too much to live up to. 6/10