Those associated with the other two copies of "The Book" wind up dead. Corso's assignment takes him from New York to Portugal to Paris. It's that rare book with a secret: Collect all three and win a visit from Satan. Langella's Balkan bad guy puts Corso (Depp) on the case of authenticating his copy of "The Book of the Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Darkness" by tracking down and comparing the two surviving copies. (In fact, he had me at "hello.") The dark, sweeping title sequence with Wojciech Kilar's nightmarish lullaby of a score evokes something you sneak into on Saturday afternoon. That's too bad because right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me. Based loosely on Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Club Dumas," "The Ninth Gate" also demonstrates that the 67-year-old can still conjure funny-scary movies - he just doesn't care whether you like them. When Frank Langella's imposing, creepy book collector tells Johnny Depp's biblio-sleuth, "All my books have only one protagonist: the devil," the knowledge that Polanski shares his affection is actually touching.
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