The Mean Season

A crime reporter is sucked deep into the story he is covering when the murderer chooses him as confidant. Russell is commanding as the burnt-out hack, but Hemingway (as his menaced girlfriend) is given no chance to do more than glow weakly beneath the darkening skies that herald Miami's 'mean season' of hurricanes. It is Jordan as the psychopath whose presence precipitates the gripping atmosphere already half achieved by Frank Tidy's photography of the humid closing of the weather. Based on the novel In the Heat of the Summer by one-time crime reporter John Katzenbach, and filmed in the actual newsroom of the 'Miami Herald', the film lacks nothing in verisimilitude. Only, perhaps, something in meaning: all the ingredients are assembled, but one leaves the cinema still waiting for someone to hand over the recipe.