If Quentin Tarantino had directed "Chinatown," it might look and sound quite a bit like ". Confidential."

　　 Make no mistake. Despite its setting — 1950s Los Angeles and, in particular, the seamy underbelly of Hollywood — this is definitely a 1990s-styled noir mystery-thriller, especially in terms of violent content and profanity. In other words, don't look for heroes like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum here, unless you expect them to have foul mouths and really, really bad tempers.

　　 Actually, the heroes of ". Confidential" are detectives Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and Bud White (Russell Crowe), a pair of imperfect and mismatched LAPD officers, who are pretty far from Bogie and Mitchum (especially when you consider the fact that both lead actors are actually Australian).

　　 The succeed-at-all-costs Exley is the LAPD's "golden boy" on the rise, having testified against some of his fellow officers for their actions in a race-motivated lockup melee. White, one of the force's loosest cannons, also participated in that riot, but only his partner was indicted and forced into retirement.

　　 Consequently, White bears a grudge against Exley, even when the two are assigned to investigate a mass-murder in a local diner — separately, （英语影评）of course. Exley actually manages to "solve" the murders and kills three suspects during a shootout, but it turns out that the suspects were patsies set up to take the fall.

　　 The two cops reluctantly join forces and begin a more covert investigation, to uncover a conspiracy involving corrupt police officials, sleazy tabloid newspaper reporters and a ring of prostitutes who are "cut" to look like the most popular actresses of the day.

　　 This is very rough stuff, with more than a little violence and profanity — enough to please just about any Tarantino fan.

　　 Adapting James Ellroy's infamous novel, director Curtis Hanson ("The River Wild," "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle") even orchestrates things along the lines of Tarantino — except that Tarantino has a much wider "vocabulary" of photographic shots. Fortunately, to compensate Hanson has a great cast (led by Crowe and Kevin Spacey, who plays a "celebrity cop") and a script (which he co-wrote) that has more humor than you might expect.

　　 Though he has a few problems with some character motivations and developments, Hanson has a lot of fun playing around with noir conventions as well. The film's requisite mystery woman in black (Kim Basinger) is a prostitute who looks uncannily like Veronica Lake, while the millionaire head of the prostitution ring (David Straithairn) is a dead ringer for Howard Hughes.