The Two Jacks, 2

The Two Jakes (1990)
directed by Jack Nicholson
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The rich stink is exactly what The Two Jakes, although a much better companion piece to Chinatown on DVD than it probably seemed in theaters in 1990, never musters. Nicholson assumes the role of patriarch, both as Gittes to Meg Tilly’s Kitty Berman and as director of Towne’s melodramatic script. Gittes wears sport coats cut big, without a vent in the back — more like a robe, really, to ash with cigars — and never quite emerges from them. I admire Nicholson for getting the movie made at all; his dedication to Roger Corman is one of his true charms. But Nicholson the actor was always too much of a loner to play dads. He was lean and good-looking, and then suddenly heavier and out-of-breath just snooping around in The Two Jakes. Nicholson’s early frame was a kind of reactionary privacy (the easy-to-anger “real man” of Anjelica’s fantasies); with heft, he became more of a personality, like Huston’s friend Orson Welles, and less the scrapper from Neptune than the wily interviewee, boasting — as he did to Rolling Stone last year — of his generous sexual prowess.

More here. It's the same article. Sorry.