Ian Shade’s review published on Letterboxd:
If Polanski's L.A. saw Gittes as a joke, Nicholson's L.A.--prosperous optimism, wrapped in plastic and earthquakes--has embraced him and followed his lead: willfully ignoring a snapshotting cad for the romance of the detective-novel detective, the (un)healthy mixture of both images leading to a much nicer, and much cleaner, office. They even gave him the rights to a full-blown narration track! But for all of his respect and hard-learned lessons, Jake is still terribly ineffectual--still stuck trying to humiliate the former players long after the offense, be it through their older selves or just by proxy of a descendant. There's a peculiar moment when Jake pulls out Evelyn's monogrammed envelope, and you think that this might be the same envelope that contained her payoff for his "detective work." You half-expect an uncashed check to waft out. It's a different letter, but the check's absence is its own little knot. Maybe it just didn't mean anything to him before everything happened, or maybe you can guess when regret kicked down that particular road. But lodged in there is the suggestion that Jake is several kinds of sentimental--just not that kind. Maybe Nicholson's L.A. is wrapped in his personal disillusion as well, and maybe Towne saw the necessity of that ending after all. However it works, this flick stings and it's keeping me awake. The only snag is that any attempt to continue Chinatown has to be an attempt to "conclude" Chinatown, and for a past that never leaves, it seems awfully pat. But it stings.