Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Boy, this breaks my heart. This film has taken a long road to the screen so far, and at one point, it coulda been a contender. But now... well, I’ll let today’s spy tell you about what he saw...
Harry,
I sent you a review of the new Kevin Costner movie, "Open Range," a couple of months back. I e-mailed this to Moriarty on April 15, but in case it got lost in a pile of e-mail, I thought I'd pass it on to you as well.
I saw "Suspect Zero" at a test screening in Pasadena on Tax Day. I didn't know anything about the movie going in, save for the fact that it starred Aaron Eckhart (so good "In the Company of Men," so lame in "The Core," which was still fresh in my mind) and Ben Kingsley (in psycho "Sexy Beast" mode, which he does so well). Knowing, too that the director was Elias Merhige of "Shadow of the Vampire" fame, I went in with decent expectations.
I was disappointed by a stylish, but exceedingly average, serial-killer film, one that stretched plausibility beyond the confines of the big screen.
Eckhart plays the big-shot FBI fuck-up that let a serial killer get away, thanks to his overeager collaring that put the guy back out on the street. He's relegated from the big time in Dallas to the purgatory of Albuquerque, N.M., where (as luck would have it) there's no shortage of wacko homicides, thanks to the knife-wielding handiwork of Kingsley (who's no slouch in the sketch-it-before-you-can-see-it school of criminology). Kingsley, we eventually find out, is an castoff from a visionary FBI program who took his work a little too seriously. And over the course of an hour and 45 minutes, we come to discover that he and Eckhart aren't so different after all (physical appearances to the contrary).
Based on Moriarty's review of the revised script posted last July (which I read after the screening), I would say the film as shot is all too faithful to that vision. I didn't buy into the "super serial killer" theory advanced by Kingsley and illustrated like a concentric swarm of bees on a map of America, and Carrie-Anne Moss was left with nothing to work with as the fellow FBI agent and zero-chemistry adversary of Eckhart's. (Good thing she's got a "Matrix" or two down the pike.)
The movie ends abruptly, and unbelievably, and the audience applause was tepid at the end. I think with a bit of reshooting and maybe ten minutes of tightening, this "Seven" wannabe could work as a Friday-night diversion, But, despite an intriguing premise, and a couple of decent performances (acting honors go to Kingsley, who reins it in for about three-fourths of the movie), the future of "Suspect Zero" is suspect at best.
Webster
Youch. I’m sorry to hear that. I like Merhige. Harry and I met him at the EXORCIST premiere we went to, and we’re both fans of SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE. In this case, the script got overdeveloped, and a good idea got lost along the way. Let’s see what they do between now and when it hits screens later this year.
"Moriarty" out.
