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.

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