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I understand how the Dennis Lehane novel could have attracted a couple of producers, now and as with all noir settings you have to toe a fine line to bring it to the screen.

First the noir style of the writer has to be translated into something visual and here Ben Affleck mostly gives us nice postcards in lieu of a real damp noir atmosphere. Basically Ben Affleck saw the story with the eyes of an actor and he dutifully transcribed it on film. Not good enough in any case, and more so with noir.

Then you have to cast a noir hero. That is someone intense and ambiguous, certainly not the nicely polished Casey Affleck and certainly not in a cutesy couple with Michelle Monaghan. This simply doesn't fit. Worst of all the director misses the plot in the denouement: as a viewer you feel like you are being left holding the bag of your emotions while the narration fizzles.

Eventually if you must do ellipses - which is quite tricky because fiddling with the timeline in a noir looks easy on paper but you have to get real creative on film - make sure that it does not feel like a power outage in the middle of the screening.

So I was quite disappointed by this neo neo noir - I admit I don't remember LA Confidential as a excellent but it was more of a heavy homage - because it fails on different important levels. The supporting cast saves the show, Ed Harris notably, but on the whole it looks better as an unopened package.

If this script is true to the book well I hope that Robert Harris had added an excellent style and more intricacies because in the screen adaptation it looks bare, a totally unenthusiastically flat thriller.

Beyond the initial exposition - that is already not really masterful and enticing - what emerges in the movie are a couple of plot twists in the process of the conclave polling process. And they are weak, like you have seen those hundreds of times in political movies and series and they are supposed to drive the action, and even worse two twists are really jumping the shark as some other reviewers have already mentioned. Real overkill in this setting of soft spoken cardinals.

In the end you cannot believe that so much quality has gone in the production design and in the casting to honor such a flimsy storyline. It is just plain dumb so this is definitely the last time I trust a journalist to describe the best movies he or she has seen during the past year.

Had it been the first feature-length movie of a young director, shot in his basement, I would have been kinder. Absolutely nothing feels original or particularly unsettling. And it often feels like a DIY movie in more than one aspect: the heavy use of a repetitive musical background (a cliché for a producer at a loss for more impact) and the episodic nature of the scenes.

But it is produced by J. J. Abrams so this all loops back to all the downtrodden clichés of Lost and other derivative narratives so, well, that puts a lot of experience into dishing out clichés wrapped up with a consistent budget.