Flawless review

Walt Koontz (Robert De Niro) and Rusty Zimmerman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are an odd couple and no mistake: a fiery tempered homophobe and a clucky drag queen thrown together in Joel Schumacher's message-laden relationship movie.

Walt is a retired New York police officer who merits hero status in his local Lower East Side neighbourhood for defusing a hostage crisis back in 1988. Unable to stomach the sight of "faggot" Rusty who lives opposite, Walt gets into shouting matches with the flamboyant drag queen and his coterie of expertly preened proteges: Cha-Cha (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), Amazing Grace (Nashom Benjamin) and Ivana (Scott Allen Cooper).

Rusty gives just as good as he gets, deflecting Walt's vitriol and insults with an arsenal of citric one-liners: "I'm more man than you'll ever be and more woman than you'll ever get."

One stormy night, drug kingpin Mr Z (Luis Saguar) storms the building, searching for a consignment of missing nose candy. Walt rushes to the rescue but collapses on the stairwell with excruciating chest pains, and wakes the next morning to find one half of his face and body paralysed.

Walt's physician, Dr Nirmala (Madhur Jaffrey), suggests taking up singing to improve his heavily slurred speech, and Rusty is reluctantly hired to help the former cop rediscover his voice, and thus his joie de vivre.

At first, their relationship is fractious, but over time, the oppression, sadness and rejection felt by both characters help to bring them together, and to see past their all too obvious prejudices.

Flawless falls well short of living up to its title, and arguably says more about its writer-director than human relationships, or the bigotry and intolerance which continue to cripple society.

Schumacher paints New York like a drab hell hole infested with caricatures and miscreants. The cops are all insensitive homophobic oafs, the women all whores, and the gay men invariably clad in sequins and heels.

Residents of Walt and Rusty's apartment block are pimps, prostitutes or drug dealers. Surrounded by all this squalor, it's perhaps no surprise that Walt and Rusty are so screwed up.

The two actors turn in superb performances: De Niro brings a quiet intensity to his fiercely proud cop, and Hoffman gently wipes away the emotional make-up of "a woman trapped in the body of a man".

However, you never once forget you are watching a performance. Schumacher's twitchy hand-held camera work is strangely effective prowling the mean streets of New York City, capturing the darker side of Big Apple life.

Strong direction partly compensates for his misfiring screenplay which peddles cliches as conversation and weighs itself down with pointless sub-plots.

The final 10 minutes are particularly risible, transforming Rusty into an accidental action hero who would gladly tiptoe along window ledges in his stilettos and throw himself through windows, just to save Walt from Mr Z and his goons. Life's a drag, and then you watch Flawless.