Good start, but then it gets ruined

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A young woman (Sherrie Rose) comes into the office of private detective Danielle Roberts (Sally Kirkland) and asks her to protect her from a guy who wants to kill her. Roberts takes the case, but the woman gets killed anyway, under mysterious circumstances. The detective is now determined to discover who killed her client and why, and in her quest she meets such characters as an oriental crime lord (James Hong) and his "daughter" (Bobbie Phillips), a creepy assassin (Sonny Landham), a half-crazy pianist (Wings Hauser) with a full-crazy wife, a cop who wants to put her behind bars (Robert Forster), and the victim's muscle-bound brother (Evan Lurie). As you can see, the cast is filled with names that should be familiar to most B (and occasionally A - Landham was in "Predator", after all!) movie fans, and the film does have some funny hard-boiled dialogue ("He'd cut off his right arm" - "Well I wouldn't want to ruin his love life!"), but the plot is pretty one-note (basically, everyone is after a precious stone that the now-dead client had stolen; nearly everyone ends up dead as well), and the direction is strictly mediocre. The film stays watchable from beginning to end, but its best scene is probably the first, which has Kirkland doing yoga over the opening credits! Who says older women cannot be fit? ** out of 4.