Somewhere between the rising popularity of dialogue from the school of David Mamet and the falling popularity of enemies from the school of Tom Clancy, moral confidence has gone out of fashion in movies about good versus evil. The color of the moment is a muted gray, accessorized by colorful plot reversals. It's a chic storytelling style appropriate for weightless games of cat and mouse -- ''Memento,'' ''Narc,'' ''The Recruit,'' that kind of fancy shadowboxing; it's also a trend of mealy artistic conservatism tricked out as cool narrative cleverness.

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