The new Robert DeNiro thriller 15 Minutes is genuinely unsettling.

Not for its graphic depiction of murder.

Not for the callous nature of the film's killers.

What's truly creepy about 15 Minutes is its observations on how far the media will go to make the news entertaining.

A pair of Eastern European hit men come to New York on a personal mission of revenge.

Back in Slovakia, Emil Slovak (Karel Roden) took the rap for a robbery while his partner Milos (Vladimir Mashkov) fled to New York with the loot.

After serving his term, Emil and his new partner Oleg Razgul (Oleg Taktarov) come in search of their share of the take.

Big problem.

Milos used the money to buy himself a little plumbing business which failed to make him a millionaire as planned.

Emil murders Milos and his wife and sets their apartment on fire to make it look like an accident.

Big problem.

A young woman friend Daphne (Vera Farmiga) saw the murders from the bathroom and escaped through the window. Emil has to find and silence her.

Bigger problem.

New York's most famed homicide detective Eddie Flemming (DeNiro) has teamed up with crack arson investigator Jody Warsaw (Ed Burns) to solve the crime.

As the investigators close in on Emil and Oleg, the pair come up with a clever plan. They'll claim to be insane, get a good lawyer, sell their story to a news show, become famous and go free.

It may sound preposterous but Emil and Oleg have been watching American crime TV and know it's all possible.

Scary.

You bet.

As written and directed by John Herzfeld, 15 Minutes is really two films.

The first is a tense cat-and-mouse police thriller which yields another dynamite performance from DeNiro that is as credible as it is effortless.

Eddie has had a highly successful symbiotic relationship with flamboyant anchorman Robert Hawkins (Kelsey Grammer).

Eddie allows Hawkins to bring his cameras to major arrests or drug busts. Hawkins gets his ratings and Eddie increases his celebrity.

When Emil decides to manipulate Hawkins, the stakes are raised.

Herzfeld's movie-within-a-movie is a satire on reality TV and has echoes of the 1976 classic Network which looked at how far a network would go to increase its ratings.

The same is true of Hawkins and his producers.

What they do to advance ratings is unconscionable but, sadly, all too true.

Burns has always been a much better director and writer than an actor because he only becomes cautious when he's in front of the camera.

It's an effective side-kick performance when it should have been as explosive and insightful as DeNiro's.

Grammer has great fun turning Hawkins into a despicable egomaniac who easily becomes the real villain of the film.

Really big problem.

Emil and Oleg are cold-blood killers but at times Herzfeld uses them for comic relief. This is inexcusable. We should never be asked to find them amusing but we do because Herzfeld is such a masterful manipulator.

He takes his audiences on wild, serpentine ride that yields major surprises with every new twist.

There's no denying that 15 Minutes is a grabber. It just grabs in a few wrong places.

(This film is rated R)

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