Clearly a driven man, Pacino's detective has grown accustomed to bending the rules in order to achieve desired justices; playing free and easy catches up to him as he navigates a moral thicket of circumstance surrounding the case, including the accidental (?) death of his partner, the victim's abusive boyfriend, and a perpetrator who gets him, essentially, over a barrel. After multiple sleepless nights and much guilt-tripping, Dormer slips into full Al Pacino mode, which is a satisfying form of American filmmaking, though it never rings completely true. He's saddled here with a script where every event is portentous, where nearly every line of dialogue is clearly meant to drill home a new dimension of ambiguity. I fully expected to see him turn to the camera at any minute and say, "Hey! I'm morally fuckin' compromised up here."

To tell the truth, I don't remember much about the Norwegian film on which this is based, except that it, too, struck me as a solidly unremarkable piece of work. But it had an otherworldly style that made it more interesting than the Hollywood version (though some of the landscapes seen here are impressive), and the imposing yet bluntly charismatic Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves) came across as a far more unsettling protagonist than the cuddly, familiar Pacino. It doesn't help director Christopher Nolan's cause that most of his directorial work feels as secondhand as the dialogue-the first third of the movie, with its nude corpse and requisite police visit to the victim's bedroom, could be taken from any number of recent murder mysteries, and a centerpiece chase scene in which the murderer's identity is revealed unexpectedly (surprise! He's Robin Williams!) is shamelessly derivative of Se7en.

To be fair, Nolan does manage some impressive sequences that replicate the effects of chronic sleeplessness, in which the back-and-forth thudding of a windshield-wiper blade or the everyday noise of a busy office turn into cacophonous, near-hallucinatory distractions. And the Panavision cinematography by Wally Pfister is sheer sensual pleasure, with the kind of rich, dark blacks that we don't see so often anymore, and a sharp focus on Pacino's pockmarked complexion. But the most distinctive stylistic flourish is the editing (crackerjack film editor Dody Dorn is clearly Nolan's secret weapon). In a faint echo of Nolan's previous Memento, Insomnia is punctuated occasionally by tiny flashbacks, little snippets of images from the pasts of the various characters that whip through Dormer's mind as he works the case. This gimmick eventually grows tiresome, as the oft-repeated close-up image of blood working its way through the fibers of a fine fabric eventually becomes demonstrably important to Dormer's psychology.

In a more substantial throwback to Memento, Dormer comes to question his own motives, particularly whether his partner's death was completely accidental. At the film's end, Dormer is a ruined man-like Leonard Shelby, he can no longer tell what his own motivations are. It's an interesting revelation, but it's an isolated one that comes too late in a movie that's too long and too dull. He does finally get some sleep as the end credits roll; for my own part, I was ready to check out about halfway through.