"Like Hong Kong action directors reinventing the western, Australia's current crop of filmmakers are happily absorbing the received wisdom of Hollywood and boomeranging it back at us. Recalibrated film noir. The costume epic as psycho drama. Road movies with no maps. There's no end to the modifications and mutations. Sometimes, of course, the boomerang catches you in the neck. In "Dark City," Down Under director Alex Proyas revisits some of the territory he created for "The Crow," a tale of murder and revenge based on James O'Barr's comic-art novel, which gothicized the city and made the set design as much a character in the film as the late Brandon Lee's unhappy character. With "Dark City," we're in a similar landscape, but this time the set design is paramount. The hero, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), awakens in a bathtub and doesn't know where he is. Neither do we. Murdoch seems to be registered at the Hotel Raymond Chandler, the city itself seems to lie somewhere between Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tim Burton's Gotham City. There's a scene at an automat. Is it the '40s? No, there's a '61 Falcon idling beside a '90s Citroen. Jessica Rabbit look-alike Jennifer Connelly, playing Murdoch's estranged wife, Emma, is a torch singer in a bygone boi^te. Kiefer Sutherland, as Dr. Daniel Schreber, looks like the kid from "A Christmas Story" all grown up and gone bad. He speaks in an asthmatic staccato and walks with a limp borrowed from Everett Sloane in "Lady From Shanghai." William Hurt, as bemused as ever, is Detective Bumstead, a refugee from pulp fiction."