This might be the most ominous sentence I've ever written: Jim Belushi stars in an erotic thriller.

The lesser Belushi is better known for subpar comedy, but he also appeared in a string of subpar crime flicks in the nineties. If you didn't already know about them, I apologize for bringing their existence to your attention. The only one that comes remotely close to being watchable is Gang Related, a reasonably competent cop drama co-starring Tupac. Unfortunately, this review is about Traces of Red, an erotic thriller in the loosest definition of both words.

The movie starts with an overhead shot of Belushi lying supine, either dead or dying from a gunshot wound to the chest. He drones through a second-rate Sunset Boulevard spiel in the requisite voiceover, and the movie flashes back to show us how he got there.

From there the story starts to resemble Tightrope. Belushi plays a cop who gets a lot of ass. Besides the occasional one-night stand, he has a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a Goodfellas-era Lorraine Bracco. Then one of his one-night stands gets killed. Is Bracco the killer? Is Belushi? Or is it some other woman he used to bang, who...I don't remember, maybe she turns out to be dead already? This movie didn't command much of my attention.

Belushi recites the voiceover like a high school principal reading the cafeteria menu over the PA. The movie slogs through a terminally dull police investigation and throws in a few more uninteresting suspects. Lorraine Bracco's body double has a nude scene. It gradually ends with a plot twist that I didn't bother unraveling to see if it made sense.

Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all. I only wrote this review to take a couple cheap shots at Jim Belushi.

3 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.