The Color Of Money, Sea Of Love, Ransom and Spike Lee’s Clockers show that writer Richard Price is – or at least was - a reliable source of edgily entertaining thrilleramas.

Freedomland is his only big-screen effort since 2000’s dodgy retread of Shaft, and both suggest a talent on the slide.

Like Clockers, Price adapts one of his own novels of urban unrest - but director and sometime studio head Joe Roth is no Spike Lee. Despite being based on a true story, this is an overwrought and strangely unconvincing affair.

Essentially Do The Right Thing wrapped around a child abduction, it begins with Julianne Moore’s carjack victim Brenda wandering bloodied, dazed and confused into a New Jersey hospital.

Her case goes to detective Lorenzo Council (Jackson), the aptly named go-to guy for the predominantly black residents of the nearby Armstrong housing project - from whence Brenda’s assailant came.

Oh, and did she mention that her son Cody was in the back of the car...? Suddenly, it’s bedlam as the police put Armstrong in lockdown to find whoever snatched the white kid.

Yet Brenda’s story doesn’t smell right. While determined to learn what her real story is, Lorenzo is caught in the escalating conflict between baton-happy cops and the angry residents who feel he’s no longer on their side.

Sadly, Roth and Price are so busy throwing red herrings around that they fumble all the interesting issues.

Sometimes lucid, but mostly acting like Rain Man on LSD, Brenda is a psychology textbook made flesh. Post-traumatic stress, self-harming, psychosis, autism, schizophrenia, catatonia – Moore has obviously done her homework… and completely buried Brenda under all her distracting tics and tricks.

In the real world, her feet wouldn’t touch the floor on the way to the psych ward. But in Freedomland, the only analysis of her condition comes from Lorenzo and Edie ‘Carmela Soprano’ Falco as the leader of some sort of concerned mothers’ flying squad.

You’d think that Lorenzo already had enough baggage to handle, what with clinging to his Christian beliefs and his son being in prison and those asthma attacks. Enough with the character quirks, already!

Elsewhere, various faces from HBO’s The Wire (to which Price also contributes) jostle for screen time with Ron Eldard as Brenda’s bad-cop brother, but they all suffer the same fate as Cody, disappearing without a trace.

What might have been a tightly rolled Spike Lee joint is instead an unsatisfying Roth broth - overcooked and hard to swallow.

Elliott Noble