When I first saw The Two Jakes, I didn't understand the whole movie. Jack Nicholson was fine as usual, so was Harvey Keitel, who plays Jake Berman, a property dealer. Whats wrong? Is the movie bad? Was Nicholson's direction poor? My first viewing confirmed all that.

Then, I saw Chinatown (1974), and I came back to this movie, its sequel. As you might know, Chinatown is a classic. A homage to the early hard-boiled private eye genre (especially Raymond Chandlers work, yessss), the film is a rejuvenated noir material. So, watching Jake, I realised that this is a continuation of Chinatown. Now, everything is falling into place.

Nicholson remarked that this movie is half as good as Chinatown. It will take a miracle to accomplish what Chinatown has, even with the same scriptwriter on board (Robert Towne). Roman Polanski, the director of Chinatown cannot set feet in America, due to legal reason (Find out why, ha-ha), so the task was originally to be taken by Towne, who had directed a few films himself. But there was a fall out (with Nicholson, I heard), and he dropped out. Nicholson came on board and voila! A half-baked but good continuation to Chinatown.

Being a fan of Raymond Chandler, I could recall him saying that a good mystery novel can still be read even if someone tore off the last chapter. True to his saying, his stories are not 'whodunits', but 'whydoits'. This film sticks to that rule. You know who the bad guy is, but you would be scratching your head trying to figure out why, like Nicholson's private eye Jake Gittes. To fans of a private eye genre like me, this movie is heaven sent.

In it you have it all: The brooding private eye, the femme fatale, the sympathetic villain and most important of all the voice-over narration. Though many critics resented the narration as they see it being too wordy or talkative, I find it to be the best part of the movie. It is almost as if written by the master craftsmen of hard-boiled prose like Chandler and the man who started it all, Dashiell Hammet.

There is no car chase, fights, explosions or that sort. The movie flopped because a generation has passed after the first Chinatown, and not many of the recent generation have the habit of watching old films. So, Two Jakes will be forgotten. If it didn't seek to continue on Chinatown, Two Jakes might have been a fine standalone private eye movie.