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The case

The killer

Matthew Rhys as Justin Price and Jennifer Sky as Vanessa Farrow

The victim

Carmine Giovinazzo as Tony Galper and Douglas Roberts as Linwood Coben

Guest cast

Matthew Rhys, Karen Maruyama, Jennifer Sky, Douglas Roberts, Carmine Giovinazzo, Julius Carry

Columbo is an inverted mystery: the murder opens the film and the killer is known from the first minutes. What you are watching for is how he proves it — see how the character works.

4:14

The murder

Justin Price is a club promoter in the Los Angeles rave scene. His girlfriend kills her ex-husband in a struggle; Price disposes of the body, burying it in concrete beneath the club, and the accident becomes a conspiracy.

Then Linwood Coben, a tabloid journalist, works out what happened and demands money. Price kills him and stages a suicide, complete with a note typed on the man's own machine.

It is a functional plot with a functional villain, and the film's real subject is a sixty-something detective moving through a nightclub full of people half his age.

The scene the film moves through is genuinely of its moment: a converted warehouse, a promoter with money problems, an audience half the lieutenant's age. The series had never engaged with contemporary youth culture before, and it does so here without the sneering that would have been easy.

The first death is not Price's doing. His girlfriend Vanessa kills her ex-husband during a confrontation, and Price — who needs the club, the licence and no police attention — takes over. Burying a man under his own dance floor is the act of someone protecting a business rather than a person.

The second killing is his alone. Coben the tabloid journalist is not a threat to Vanessa; he is a threat to the club, and Price deals with him the way he deals with a supplier problem.

How Columbo gets him

The generational gap does most of the work. Columbo in a rave, asking about music he cannot hear over, is the last comic set-piece the character gets, and Falk plays it without a hint of self-pity.

The investigation itself is old-fashioned and solid: a suicide note that is too well-typed, a timeline that does not fit, a concrete floor that was poured on the wrong day.

Price is not a match for him, and the film knows it. There is no duel here, only a young man being slowly and politely dismantled by someone who has done this sixty-eight times before.

Columbo in a nightclub is the last great comic setting the series gives him, and Falk plays it straight: he asks about the music, accepts a bottle of water, and conducts an interview by shouting over a bassline.

The evidence is dull in the best sense. A concrete floor poured on a particular day, a licence application, a suicide note produced on a typewriter by somebody who did not know the dead man's habits.

There is no duel, and the film does not pretend there is. Price is out of his depth from the first conversation and the lieutenant treats him almost gently.

8:17

Worth knowing

• Broadcast on 30 January 2003, the last Columbo film ever made; Falk was seventy-five.
• Matthew Rhys, later of The Americans, plays Price in an early role.
• Falk continued to say he would make more, and a further script was in development when his health declined.
• Matthew Rhys was twenty-eight; his casting was a deliberate attempt to bring a younger audience to the final film.
• The club sequences were shot at a working Los Angeles venue over two nights.
• Falk gave interviews after broadcast saying he expected to make more films; a further script existed but was never produced.

Verdict

Not a great finale, and not a bad film. The mystery holds together, the setting is used honestly rather than mocked, and the character is entirely intact at the end of thirty-five years.

There is something appropriate about it ending this way: no farewell, no retirement, no final case. Just another murderer, another notebook, and a man walking off to find his car.

As a last episode it is unglamorous, and there is something right about that. The character does not retire, reflect or say goodbye — he closes a case and goes to find his car.

It is also, quietly, the only Columbo film in which the lieutenant is unambiguously the oldest person in every room, and Falk plays that without a single line acknowledging it.

Familiar faces

Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.

• John Finnegan as Sean Jarvis12 episodesalso in Blueprint for Murder, The Most Dangerous Match, Lovely But Lethal, A Friend in Deed, Last Salute to the Commodore and 6 more

Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →