Rob Dean examines the overlooked, unappreciated or unfairly maligned movies. Sometimes these films haven't been seen by anyone, and sometimes they've been seen by everyone - who loathed them. This is Missing Reels.

Today's film is the 1998 comic-neo-noir-detective-character-study Zero Effect. With an easy sell like that, how could it have not done well?  Written and directed by Jake Kasdan (yes, son of Lawrence "I Wrote the Good Parts of Your Favorite Movies But Also Dreamcatcher" Kasdan), the film is a look at a quirky detective who's idiosyncratic approach to crime-solving makes him a very successful sleuth, but also marks him as an oddball outcast who is ill-equipped to deal with people. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Like the entire line up of USA programming from Monk onward?

Well, apparently it was too ahead of its time as most people haven't seen it. Using IMDB's numbers, the budget was $5M and it only made about $2M in its theatrical run. People were not coming out to see "the world's most private detective." This is also due to how the film was marketed: a quirky comedy starring that guy from that show on Fox that no one saw but won an Emmy, and all those other hilarious comedies!

Ultimately, it's a real shame that people haven't seen this film. Zero Effect is a good character study of people who set out to define their lives but ultimately are defined by outside forces. It's also a great updating of Sherlock Holmes, taking the obsessive, addict, musical and social malcontent elements and bringing them into late 90s America. And, lastly but not leastly, it's an interesting mystery movie that quickly solves the original mystery in favor of finding the deeper reasons and more profound secrets that are at work.

But why is it so good?

Obviously, "good" is a subjective term; what I find good, others find horrible and, conversely, what others find good, I find Glee. So your mileage may vary on Zero Effect, but here is where I enumerate the reasons that Zero Effect needs to be rediscovered and celebrated by others as opposed to banished to the forgotten bins of history celebrated by just a small handful of nerds and hipsters who have to work very hard to convince others that Bill Pullman is the shit in this flick.

Zero Effect tells the tale of Daryl Zero (Pullman), the world's greatest private detective, who is hired by Gregory Stark (Ryan O'Neal) to find Stark's keys and figure out who is blackmailing Stark. Of course, Stark doesn't just call up Zero or drop by his office like in a Raymond Chandler story. He goes through Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller), Zero's assistant, in order to obtain Zero's services. Why does Zero make people go through all of these hoops? Because, to put it bluntly, he's a freak; he takes methamphetamine, writes terrible music, feels more comfortable in disguise than he does in his own skin and lives in a absurdly secure penthouse apartment where he only eats cans of soup, tuna, garbage bags full of pretzels and a fridge filled only with Tab. He is as precise in his own habits and preferences as he is ignorant of anything broaching common social etiquette.

That central mystery of the keys and blackmail? Zero solves that in about 10 minutes of screen time. What could the rest of the film possibly be about? Zero is more interested in the deeper mystery - not the who's or the how's, but the Why's and Wherefore's. Even though he's technically finished the job Stark paid him to do (quite handsomely at that), Zero hangs around Portland, OR so that he can see the entire tapestry of life, choices and actions that have culminated in keys being lost. This could be seen as ridiculous - why wouldn't Zero take the money and run? - but under Kasdan's direction it becomes clear that its the central compulsion of this obsessively compulsive character. Zero feels outside of humanity - it allows him to be objective and observe everything ("the Two OBs, as I call them," he quips); but that sense of being an outsider, of being detached from the rest of the world, is what makes him naturally inquisitive about human nature. It's that drive to figure out why people do what they do, and his barely conscious need to classify all behaviors and actions, that makes him a great private detective and perfect as a vehicle for this movie.

But this isn't a taut psychological thriller, or a twee indie quirkfest character study; it's a well plotted Holmes adaptation filled with brilliant one-liners that rival Fletch in number (my favorite? "...and Gregory Stark is the son of a fat man") that features great performances by Pullman, Stiller, O'Neal and Kim Dickens as the woman at the heart of it all.

O'Neal is pretty perfect as the unfortunate slimeball Gregory Stark. His history as former Hollywood It Boy and star of Love Story tie in to Stark's own background of privilege and falling from grace. Add in to that the whole "Remember when he hit on his daughter at Farrah Fawcett's funeral?" thing that underscores the awfulness inherent in him, and you have an actor bringing a lot of psychological power into a role just by being himself.

Dickens does quite well in her role as Gloria Sullivan, foreshadowing her amazing work in Deadwood and Treme (and Hollow Man). A mixture of anger, passion, toughness and hurt, Sullivan is doing a bad thing for the right reasons and is at once the polar opposite of Daryl Zero while essentially being a kindred soul to his. A history of pain and betrayal fuels their actions, coupled with a need to understand why people cause such pain and betrayal, that leads to meticulous planning and an almost superhuman ability to observe the world around them.

At the end of the day, Zero Effect is made up of excellent performances delivering great lines in a movie that defies easy categorization or reduction. It's enthralling and hypnotizing, a movie that I can watch endlessly and still find something new while being comforted by the familiarity of it's uniqueness.  It's not that much of a mystery of why it didn't do better in theaters; to quote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was "too weird to live, and too rare to die." So it lives on, playing endlessly for those willing to find it and examine it, mining it for clues to the human condition like its quirky protagonist at a crime scene.

(For more on Zero Effect, please do check out Scott Tobias's excellent piece on it for the New Cult Canon at The A.V. Club)