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Downtown LA, 1946. A time when women wore blood red nail varnish and set their hair in waves, and men wore trilbies and braces, and talked out of the sides of their mouths through clouds of unfiltered cigarette smoke. You can't understand a word they say. Don't worry. The first half hour of the film is completely irrelevant anyway. There's a boxing match. It's bloody. There's a shootout. It's messy. Finally, there's a murder. It's grisly.

Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia (named after her favourite hair accessory) is a failed actress whose desperate quest for fame leads to a ghastly death in the Hollywood hills, her face slashed into a hideous grimace, her innards disembowelled, Jack the Ripper style. And as our hero, the puppy-faced ex-boxer turned cop Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) sets out to find her killer, helped (or rather hindered) by his obsessive partner, Lee Blanchard, his hunt leads him from LA's glitzy lesbian speakeasies (with entertainment from KD Lang - who else?) to the homes of the Hollywood elite, where he tracks down the femme fatale heiress and Dahlia lookalike Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank, looking gorgeous but sporting a somewhat uneven Cate-Blanchett-does-Katherine-Hepburn accent), who seems to know more about Betty Short than she should.

Confused? You will be.

The trouble with this film is, like Hilary Swank's accent, it can't really make up its mind what it wants to be. LA Confidential-style film noir, filled with fast paced, brutal action scenes and shocking revelations (both films are, after all, based on novels by James Ellroy)? The Usual Suspects-style thriller, where nothing is quite what it seems, and no-one can be trusted? A flashback to De Palma's own good cop/bad guy classic The Untouchables? Or an OTT David Lynchean satirical black comedy, as evidenced in a dysfunctional dinner party chez the super-snobby Linscotts (where the prize for worst accent has to go to John Kavanagh as the ex-pat Emmlich Linscott - such a tragic desecration of the Scots tung has not been heard since Sir Sean Connery tried to be Irish - and the prize for most brilliant piece of overacting since Johnny played Jack Sparrow goes to Fiona Shaw as Linscott's wife Ramona, a kind of tragic, Glenn-Close-on-acid, alcoholic society queen)?

It's a bizarre set of ingredients, and as a result, the whole thing turns out to be a bit of a mess. There are some superb set pieces (the aforementioned dinner party, which is utterly hilarious but seems as out of place in the film as an Oliver!-style song and dance number in an Ingmar Bergman piece, and a jaw-droppingly suspenseful fight sequence in an old hotel, which culminates in the matter of fact, Mafioso incineration of the resulting corpses) but there's also a fair amount of peripheral nonsense to wade through in between, mainly featuring Scarlett Johansson, a woman who looks like a 1940s starlet most of the time anyway, so who seems right at home here, but who's actually given very little to do other than pout her unfeasibly enormous red lips and look vaguely worried.

That said, like Johansson, the film looks great: with lavish sets, gorgeous glam frocks for the dolls and spiffy sharp suits for the guys, it's a sumptuous five course feast for the eyes. However, it's let down by a baggy plot, indecipherable dialogue and a preponderance of red herrings that add nothing to the flavour - not to mention a solution to the notorious true crime that beggars all belief.

Somewhere in here there's a lovely little film noir just begging to get out, but at just over two hours long, The Black Dahlia could use a lot of pruning before it can truly flower.