While Femme Fatale lustrously captures the aroma and atmosphere of film noir, it tends to violate one of the abiding principles of its greatest practitioner, Raymond Chandler: playing fair with the reader, or in this case, the viewer. Put another way, unless you're Criswell, you don't necessarily see the resolution coming - much less receive a hint or a glimmer of it by word, thought or deed of its participants. Then again, this is porn; not Congressional hearings over the disappearance of nuclear secrets.

Randy Spears is exceptionally cast as the detective haunted by his partner's death. We can only assume that partner to have been Alec Metro, since the script is unusually terse. This allows a broader play of sex, with seven full-tilt "commercial" scenes (all but one of these anal), and one blowjobber received by Metro until his untimely demise by casual screen reference. This brevity is quite less than the soul of wit for the armchair detective who delights in playing whodunit (or "who's doing it"). Nevertheless, Spears, attempting to figure out just that, squints and smokes and does reaction shots with a cigarette as well as any weathered noir denizen can be expected to do, and delivers voiceover as crisp as the proverbial slap in the kisser or a slug from a .45.

On the trail of a copycat murder, Spears' investigation takes him to the doorstep of Shanna McCullough, a retired cop, who closed the file on a similar femme fatale case 22 years earlier, and it's Spears' resultant dialogues with the made-up-to-look-ancient McCullough that trigger a series of flashbacks, most of which result in some horny cop's dick breaching some hooker's asshole during a compromising investigation. McCullough and Lauren Montgomery share a non-poop-chute threeway with Kyle Stone; Spears nails Silvia Saint in the ass from several good positions before heaving globs of detective spasm on her lovely blond snoot; Jon Dough interrogates Bridgett Kerkove's asshole on the hood of a car in a threeway that includes Kristen; Saint gets it in the ass again from both Pat Myne and Nick East; Mickey G. interrogates Gwen Summers in an alleyway in probably the best sexually addressed scene in the film; Vince Vouyer, as Mickey's son, follows in dad's footsteps with a hooker and her asshole, while Spears, after waking up in the middle of the night with a dark sweat and an obvious boner in his cotton briefs, puts it to good use by nailing Summers in her alleyway.