The initial Hitchcockian tension soon slackens into slop, with a dash of lukewarm eroticism.
And without that crispness and tightness, "Il Trovatore," which can be riveting, all too easily slackens into yet another punch line.
Sustaining such a long book is a tough endeavor, and every so often his prose slackens into inert phrases ("his mind would be tumbling like a dryer").
Occasionally the language slackens into cliché: "we were finally addressing the elephant in the room"; "I could get into a sticky situation"; "I hadn't quite passed the sniff test".
The unkindest thing one can say about Reagan the actor — for he was hardly ever embarrassing, often endearing, as reliable as the watch that he wore on the inside of his wrist — is that his reliability could slacken into dullness, and that he was the sort of person to whom casting agents turned when sequels were afoot.
Although her face can slacken into what looks like sullenness — an expression seized upon by news photographers, who like to capture her hovering behind the Mayor, as if she were his cheerless errand girl — she is an effective public speaker, with a biography that ties her persuasively to the city's master narrative of immigrant striving, of survival and success.
Although her face can slacken into what looks like sullenness an expression seized upon by news photographers, who like to capture her hovering behind the Mayor, as if she were his cheerless errand girl she is an effective public speaker, with a biography that ties her persuasively to the city's master narrative of immigrant striving, of survival and success.
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This season's NFL games have not been up to par; they've dragged and slackened into something altogether more static and claustrophobic and chippy and shouty-shovey than most fans have ever seen.
Howard's novels have their own tendency to slacken in places into banal unnecessary detail; in the biography we surely didn't need to know, for example, who was feeding the Amises' cats when they went to New York in 1967.
