Militant revolutionaries rant hard about working for the interests of ordinary people. Totalitarian governments do the same thing. The former lot are drunk with their own pretentious ideologies, believe they have hit upon perfect solutions for using the state to hand things out properly, and think that their bully tactics are for a higher cause. Suited demagogues are just as confident -- they see hard-line control of government, including heavy use of armed forces and social repression, as the only frank way of keeping populations in order.

Both are stupid and evil. Once you start associating yourself with extremism, you drift away from common sense and the common man becomes less relevant than your own view of what is best for him. Someone once said, in a quote whose exact wording escapes me right now, that the greatest tyranny always comes from men attempting to create their vision of utopia.

The Dancer Upstairs takes place in an unnamed South American country, where one honest policeman has been assigned to find a revolutionary leader named Ezequiel. The radical group has been hanging dogs from lampposts and indoctrinating the countryside, and slowly and silently consolidating their position. The authorities are only now becoming clued into the operation, and just in the nick of time, as it seems they're about to strike big.

The police officer is a quiet, sharp and collected former lawyer played by Javier Bardem, the famous Spanish actor who received an Oscar nomination two years ago for Before Night Falls. He studies evidence gradually, finding that those who are attempting to overthrow the government are inspiring fear in their strongholds and empty fanaticism among their hardcore supporters. The government rushes to get troops on the streets, seek out and assassinate suspected rebels and generally get in the way of the police investigation. Bardem does the best and most decent job he can in the face of unhelpfulness from both sides.

This is the directorial debut of John Malkovich, who does not appear in the film, and shows himself to be a loose but not untalented filmmaker. Long stretches in The Dancer Upstairs are terrific – Malkovich uses a lot of darkness, but also a lot of strong Latin American colour; his film looks strong, and he knows how to compose frames and use quiet sounds to create lyrical anticipation and suggest more than is happening onscreen.

Settings and themes are interesting. Dialogue is tense, sometimes undercut by dry wit: After some important government officials have been killed in a theatre performance entitled "Blackout", one of Bardem's bosses notes, "Good thing it wasn't 'Evita', or we wouldn't have a government." And the intense gravitas of Bardem is absorbing – he has a strong, sincere look about him that seems to suggest without effort the inner workings of a man struggling to calmly do the right thing.

But eventually I got fed up with the movie. The slow pacing becomes methodical, and the final stretches, which should be lingering and reflecting on emotional threads, simply end up ponderous. The title refers to a relationship between the cop and his daughter's dance teacher, whose dynamics I found hard to follow, perhaps because they are motivated by the attractiveness of the actors and the need for the screenplay to find a counterpoint to the character of Bardem's shallow wife, rather than an actual human connection. As for the final revelation regarding the dancer... is it me, or was that obvious from the beginning? Maybe it's supposed to be? If so, why wasn't more made of it?

(Released by Fox Searchlight and rated "R" for strong vilence and language.)

Review also posted at www.ukcritic.com.