Metacritic reviews

Even if this isn't Schrader's best, it's hardly his worst.

Harrelson's charming flamboyance - seen to great effect in "No Country for Old Men" - is a great fit for Carter, who carries no small amount of self-loathing under his carefully coifed toupee.

Schrader's main interest is not in the mystery, per se, but in the political intrigue of incestuous Washington, where conflicts of interest are the norm and morality is indeed relative. The points are well-taken, but Harrelson's performance often gets in their way.

This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.

While it can be labeled a thriller or a murder mystery, the film is talky, unhurried, contains little action and shows more interest in how characters think and behave than in its plot.

The brittle, very ''written'' catty quips meant to characterize Washington hypocrisy sound perfunctory; the story of an aging, self-hating homosexual who goes home alone to his lacquered town house feels ancient as well as uncomfortable for the writer-director. (Harrelson seems both game and ill at ease.)

By the end of The Walker a movie that begins as a dazzling round of charades has deteriorated into a plodding game of Clue.

The whole thing feels fusty and forced.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

A mystery that isn't mysterious, a thriller that's barely thrilling.