Suspect Zero

To paraphrase the Buzzcocks' immortal question, have you ever fallen in love with something you shouldn't have fallen in love with?  I don't know why, but I really like the idea of the thriller movie genre.  That's unfortunate, because there are damn few good thrillers out there.  Like a love-sick moron, though, I find myself going back to the genre that has treated me bad, time and time again.  I thought that Suspect Zero might be different.  It has Aaron Eckhart, who has been pretty good in the few films of his I've seen, and Ben Kingsley, who is an acclaimed actor, even if I haven't seen him in much.  The director's previous film was the pretty clever Shadow of the Vampire, so that was a promising sign, too.  There are also warning signs that this might not be a good movie.  Tom Cruise produced the film, but had his name removed from the credits.  One of the writers co-wrote X-Men 3, Elektra, and Inspector Gadget.  Yeesh.  What will win, solid acting and directing, or poor writing?

FBI agent Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has found himself shuffled off to the Phoenix office, which is so lame that they don't have a Starbucks anywhere nearby (hmm...I seriously doubt the truth of that).  Despite the demotion (in stature, if not pay), Mackelway finds himself involved in a serial killer case right off the bat.  The weird thing about this case is that the killer is littering the crime scenes with clues that lead to other crime scenes.  One seemingly dull man is found dead and, at the place where he was last seen, the killer's car is found with another dead body in the trunk, and the body is the first breadcrumb of evidence that leads to several murders across several states.  The dead bodies all have their eyelids cut off and a circle with a line through it found at every scene.  Okay...pretty creepy, right?  Well, it turns out that the killer knows about Mackelway and he starts mailing and faxing him stuff --- seemingly random numbers, missing person reports, and hand-scrawled notes egging him on.  Will Mackelway be able to catch this killer?  Probably, since this is a movie.  The question is, rather, once he finds the killer, will the truth behind the murders lead Mackelway to arrest or help with the next kill?

At least, that's how the synopsis of this movie should go.  Instead, every review, preview, brief summary, and movie trailer for this film explains that the serial killer is murdering other serial killers. 

A killer targeting bad guys?  How novel.

Unfortunately for this movie, that defining plot element isn't revealed until almost an hour into the movie.  Sorry, plot twist, but everybody knows you're coming to the party.  That annoying reveal aside, how does the film fare?

Despite a decent cast, Suspect Zero feels like a B-movie.  As the serial killer, Ben Kingsley succeeds in making his character unsympathetic and inhuman.  Unfortunately, that same alien nature also makes his line delivery suspect, with occasionally shouted lines at inappropriate times.  To tell the truth, it feels like Kingsley is slumming in this role.  Aaron Eckhart is decent enough when he is playing detective, but his character is awfully cliched.  I normally find Eckhart to be inoffensive, but he is forced to overact in this role and I can only take so many shots of him with crazy eyes before I get bored.  Carrie-Anne Moss plays Eckhart's reluctant partner and the window to his "mysterious" past --- her character is more of a convenient way to fill in the character background for Eckhart than anything else, so I suppose she was fine.  The cast is rounded out by a group of recognizable character actors.  Harry Lennix plays the stereotypically not "with it" FBI boss, William Mapother is an inconsequential-to-the-plot FBI agent, and Frank Collison played his typical creepy role.

Collison says you just missed Kingsley, FBI man.  He R-U-N-N-O-F-T.

Director E. Elias Merhige tried to craft a standard thriller with the pieces available to him, but he was working with a pretty ridiculous script.  All the pieces for a crafty thriller are there, with surprising plot reveals that force the characters to make radical decisions, but I don't think Merhige knew what to do with the more Stephen King-ish aspects to the movie.

That's right, this script has some unexplained supernatural phenomena in it, a la Mr. King.  Surprisingly, the script is not based on one of his books, though.  You see, Ben Kingsley's character has the psychic ability to "see" serial killers, but he can't stop "seeing" them, so he has gone off the deep end.  And he apparently can "see" Aaron Eckhart's character, even though he is not a serial killer.  And Aaron Eckhart can kind of "see" things, too.  And sometimes, this "sight" lets them glimpse the future.  Ponder that for a few moments and let it sink in.

Are your detective skills warning you about a bad movie?

Suspect Zero is a surprisingly dumb movie.  The filmmakers took the concept of a serial killer --- and I think we can agree that they're scary because they look like normal people, right? --- and makes the primary killer (Kingsley) very abnormal with his mental abilities.  That's missing the appeal of the concept in a very basic way.  And how about those mental abilities?  Kingsley sees into the minds of serial killers --- except when he's looking at a good FBI agent! --- and can see into the future, which nothing to do with connecting his mind to another person's.  I get it, I get it, if you're willing to swallow the clairvoyant serial killer bit, it's not much more of a stretch to add "prescient" to his resume.  It's still silly and lame.  And I absolutely love that Eckhart's apparent psychic power is never explained and nobody seems very interested in it.  Ugh.  This movie stirs up my bile.

The worst thing about Suspect Zero is that it fails with even the most modest of goals.  It never tries to be terribly interesting or competent, it just wants to be a mediocre thriller that will periodically wind up on SyFy at 3AM.  If the whole psychic thing was played up a bit more as the reason this movie is special, then I might have another opinion, but the film was emphasizes the whole serial killer killing serial killers bit.  That seemingly can't miss formula --- twice the crazy killers = twice as awesome --- can't succeed if the killers are free of personality and/or believability.  On the bright side, there is a scene that implies bestiality with a donkey, which most serial killer movies don't have.  There are also a few idiotic timing/editing mistakes that I found very enjoyable; the best was Kingsley's first kill, where he left a building after his prey and still managed to sneak into the back seat of his victim's car without the victim (who walked directly to his vehicle) noticing.  These occasional lapses in quality control are really the only things that entertained me in this movie.

If you're not familiar with the Buzzcocks, here's a video of the band in their late-70s prime.  It doesn't really have anything to do with Suspect Zero, but it kept popping up in my head while writing this review, and that's all the excuse I need.

Unthinkable

With a title like Unthinkable, you have to ask yourself exactly what would be "unthinkable?"  That's right...the title makes you think about what would be unthinkable.  Is that a sign of a clever movie, or just a stupid one?  I'm not going to answer that question for you, and neither is this movie.

Yusuf (Michael Sheen), formerly known as Steven Younger, sent a homemade recording to government agencies, where he announced that he has hidden three identical nuclear bombs in three American cities and they will explode in just over six days, unless his demands are met; he will issue the demands soon.  What follows is an examination of the usefulness of, and the government's right to, torture suspects in extreme cases.  On the torture-is-bad side, we have FBI Agent Helen Brody (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her team, who investigate the hundreds of (usually useless) tips from citizens regarding possible terrorists on American soil.  In the middle are the suits, the higher-ups that want plausible deniability in case any torture is made public, but also want results at any cost.  On the torture-is-effective side, we have Jack Bauer a man called H (Samuel L. Jackson).  H doesn't legally exist because he is an expert in effective torture.  But his torture is well beyond waterboarding and the like.  Within a minute of entering the interrogation room, he cuts off Yusuf's pinkie fingertip, without even asking a question.  That is as nice as H gets, and he will never be that pleasant again.  I don't have much positive to say about this movie, but I will admit that H's methods were occasionally shocking and, dare I say, unthinkable.  The film goes on to ask a great many questions.  Is it ever okay to torture?  What are the limits to torture?  Can good people allow torture?  Torture torture torture torture?  You get the idea.

I am normally a fan of Samuel L. Jackson in just about anything, but this is the most cartoony effort I have seen from him.  And I don't appreciate the man for his subtle acting skills.

Case in point.

I think my problem is that his character is a mean SOB and the smartest man in the room.  He's thinking at least two steps ahead of all the other good guys, so when he does something awful, like castrating Yusuf, it builds to something important ten minutes later.  What's bad about that?  He sounds like Batman!  Well, the problem is that the film doesn't support his actions; this movie balances both sides of the torture issue and H is often seen as a bad man.  That's just mixed messages, folks.  Having Carrie-Anne Moss and her pseudo-emoting doesn't help the human rights side, unfortunately.  She frets and she hovers, but she is nowhere near strong enough a character to compare with Sam Jackson when he's cutting off fingertips.  Michael Sheen does a decent job, but his acting style (at least, when he's not playing a werewolf) is too subtle to compete with Sam Jackson.  There is a surprising number of recognizable actors in supporting roles here (Brandon Routh, Gil Bellows, Martin Donovan, Benito Martinez, Stephen Root, and Holmes Osbourne), but they are given absolutely no screen time or character development.  Director Gregor Jordan gets the point across that there is no consensus on the torture debate, but that is about all he accomplishes.

What makes this movie underwhelming is the sheer number of moments that made me ask, "Really?" aloud.  In an absolutely irrelevant bit of plot, Agent Brody's team is sent to question every single person they are keeping tabs on, which happens to include H's Islamic wife.  H, being a bad-ass, takes down (but doesn't kill) the first agents that show up at his house; he does bad things for a living, so who knows if those are fake badges, right?  Well, H is then questioned and then the governmental higher-ups have him released, only to return to the movie less than five minutes later as Mr. Interrogator.  What was the point of all that?  Why not just introduce him as the interrogator and cut the rest?  This movie was twenty minutes longer than it needed to be, and it's only 90-some minutes long!  And why did all this happen?  The CIA accidentally sent over a file on H and his family to the FBI --- and that is not a building block for any other plot lines.  It's just, "Oh, the CIA mail boy is stupid, finds confidential files, and mails them to random government agencies."

The worst part of the whole movie is the ending.  SPOILER ALERT, IN CASE YOU STILL WANT TO SEE THIS CRAPPY MOVIE.  All along, it has been said that Yusuf stole between 15 and 18 pounds of fissionable bomb-making-stuff.  All along, it has been said that each of his three bombs has 4.5 pounds of the fissionable stuff in it.  If you do the math, that adds up to 13.5 pounds of danger fuel, which implies that there is a fourth bomb somewhere.  I figured that out on my own, about a third of the way through the movie, but H is the only character that figured it out, and he doesn't mention it until the last few minutes.  So, maybe it's a twist.  That could be, but Yusuf manages to commit suicide before the fourth bomb is proved or disproved, and the movie ends moments later, with Agent Brody taking Yusuf's children out of whatever building all this took place in.  Fade to black, roll credits, and forget that there was a twist only three minutes earlier, where a nuclear weapon was left unaccounted for.  I have to admit, this is the first time I have seen a movie where the heroes are looking for a nuke, don't find it, and then the movie ends.  Normally, I would call that sort of plot development moronic, but in this case I'll call it unthinkable.