Ask the Dust (2006) Review

Following collaborations with Oliver Stone and Terrence Malick, Colin Farrell teams up with yet another Grade-A American filmmaker. But the result, unfortunately, is C minus.

Another solid performance © Paramount Classics

Jennifer Garner; Drew Barrymore; Cameron Diaz; Jessica Alba. These are just a few of the leading ladies Irish actor Colin Farrell has yet to gaze at on screen with his smiling eyes, partly because despite being one of Hollywood's hottest heartthrobs, the dream factory has yet to cast him at the forefront of a contemporary, heterosexual romance.

Farrell was brilliant in support in 2004's At Home at the End of the World, but his portion of the narrative involved same-sex subplotting. Now, on the heels of the little seen period drama The New World from Terrence Malick, Farrell arrives in another period drama, Robert Towne's long-dreamed-of adaptation of John Fante's slim novella Ask the Dust.

All told, the closest Farrell has come as a leading man to locking lips in the here and now with an American co-star is those ten days he spent in downtown Los Angeles filming Phone Booth, when he gently cradled a receiver under the direction of Joel Schumacher. And with the cop dramas Miami Vice and Pride and Glory on the horizon, the 29-year-old Dublin native will have to make do - for now - with the above mentioned romances in Conquistador-era America and Depression-era Los Angeles.

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