A serial killer is on the loose, and FBI agent Thomas Mackelway is on the case, sifting through clues to uncover the criminal's identity. But there's one unusual twist: The bloodthirsty felon's victims of choice are other serial killers.I can't pass up a movie that sells itself on its sheer density of serial kilers. Plus, it's in high-def.
0:30: The credits are in a scratchy font that's overlaid with a distortion effect, which means that this movie has managed to rip-off of Seven before the first scene even begins.
1:15: We open on a diner in the rain, which could also be considered a ripoff of Seven, although I guess Seven doesn't really have a copyright on rain in movies. Although it probably could.
3:43: Ben Kingsley sits down across from a fat man and starts up a stereotypical "crazy person conversation" by asking invasive questions and by showing the fat man some pencil sketches, which I guess we're supposed to assume are crazy person drawings.
5:25: The fat man gets in his car and starts driving away nervously. I wonder how long it's going to take before we find out that he's really a serial killer.
6:55: Ben Kingsley is hiding in the fat man's backseat pulling on surgical gloves! He shows one of his "creepy" drawings and implies that he's going to kill the fat man. End scene. I'm impressed that nobody who made this movie was tempted to put any sort of clever spin in lifting the old killer in the backseat urban legend.
8:15: Hey, Aaron Eckhart's in this movie, playing an FBI agent who's been transferred to Albuquerque from Dallas. The office also contains the guy who played Boyd in Dollhouse and someone who had a bit role on lost.
10:14: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting some strange faxes of missing people marked for his eyes only.
12:15: Aaron Eckhart and Boyd from Dollhouse go to investigate the death of the fat guy from the first scene. The Albuquerque police/FBI are being portrayed as
13:22: Did I mention that the score for this movie is a combination of vaguely Native American woodwinds and chanting? It's clearly supposed to be arty, but it comes off as kind of annoying. Also, Ben Kingsley's doing some sort of guided imagery meditation and having some sort of psychic vision of Aaron Eckhart investigating the dead fat guy's car, which he draws a picture of.
17:13: Now Trinity from The Matrix is here, who is also an FBI agent from Dallas sent to help with the fat guy's murder. They're reviewing pictures of forensic evidence on a table in the middle of a diner. Are they allowed to do that?
20:23: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity from The Matrix are alluding to a boring backstory when they find a dead guy in the trunk of a car in the diner's parking lot with the movie's logo carved into the back of his chest.
21:00: Remember when I said this movie was trying to rip off Seven? I was wrong. It's trying to rip off Twin Peaks. Inexplicably, it's apparently doing so by shooting on the crappiest digital video I've ever seen and having all the actors to deliver their lines with no intonation, and not setting any sort of context for what the hell is going on.
26:12: Aaron Eckhart and Trinity find Ben Kingsley's lair. He has a bunch of clippings of newspapers that detail how Aaron Eckhart got in trouble by arresting a killer in another state without an extradition treaty. This is reiterated in a flashback scene that also intimates that Aaron Eckhart also has psychic powers.
31:10: I need to point out that there appears to have been no attempt whatsoever to employ lighting in this movie.
31:52: Now we're in psychic-vision again (read: a red filter slapped across a canted long-shot) and we're seeing someone who's probably Ben Kingsley sketching Aaron Eckhart's face and writing "Heightened Awareness. Chronic Insomnia. Acute Migranes. He Is The One." Is this all an elaborate clinical trial for Excedrin PM?
32:13: Another arty montage of Ben Kingsley drawing and more psychic visions of Aaron Eckhart doing police stuff.
34:44: More serial killin's afoot! Some redneck abducts a woman in the parking lot of a bar and rapes her in a truck. Then Ben Kingsley shows up, pulls him out of the window of the truck, and kicks his ass, which seems physically improbable. Then he kills him.
37:40: It turns out this victim is the same guy that got off when Aaron Eckhart flagrantly disregarded state jurisdiction statutes. More ambient music and lots of close-ups of Aaron Eckhart's face, presumably conveying his harried emotional state. Aaron Eckhart finds a message left by Ben Kingsley saying "You're Welcome Tom"
41:11: Now they're at the FBI office talking about how the locations of the bodies match GPS coordinates found at Ben Kingsley's old room. I can envision the meeting where the writer and director of this movie are desperately trying to think of plot devices that haven't been used in a thousand other serial killer movies. "I know - GPS coordinates!"
42:28: Now Aaron Eckhart's getting a message from a "professor of criminal biology." What the fuck does that mean? The movie, of course, doesn't bother to even make it sound like a real thing. Aaron Eckhart goes to visit this guy, who has a bunch of Native American crap on his walls. Cue more fucking flute music. The professor of criminal biology explains that Ben Kingsley was once a student of his, his Anakin Skywalker if you will, and that he had a pet theory about somebody he called the "suspect zero," who is basically a serial killer that nobody can tell is a serial killer because he's so good at being a serial killer there's no consistent pattern to the murders.
44:33: Aaron Eckhart asks the professor of criminal biology if Ben Kingsley might be the suspect zero. "That's a plausible theory." Based on this, we can safely assume that there's no way that Ben Kingsley is the real suspect zero and that it's going to turn out to be Aaron Eckhart himself in a shocking twist ending in about 45 minutes. The "he is the one" thing would seem to foreshadow this. Backup possibility: it's Trinity from The Matrix.
47:42: Now Ben Kingsley is at a funeral in a black church and is crying for whatever reason.
49:11: Aaron Eckhart is looking over all of the crazy scribblings that Ben Kingsley has sent him. One of them is a drawing of a vagina. He's also having psychic visions, which are different from Ben Kingsley's because they are grainy black and white.
50:12: Now Aaron Eckhart goes over to Trinity's house (in the rain, natch) and mumbles a bunch of stuff about how he's close to cracking open the case and also expresses some generic torment about his headaches. It's revealed that he and Trinity have a romantic past. Have I mentioned this is a terrible movie?
53:13: Aaron Eckhart goes to question the fat guy's wife again on a hunch, but she can't talk to him for very long because she has a PTA meeting to go to. You'd think she'd take a break from that shit considering her husband just died. As she leaves, Aaron Eckhart notices that Ben Kingsley's sent him a bunch of drawings of the house, so he breaks back into it and finds a big trunk in the attic with a bunch of serial killer stuff. Then in a voiceover scene Aaron Eckhart tells us that the FBI also figures out that the other dead guy who Aaron Eckhart and Trinity found in the car a half-hour ago was also a serial killer. We are now officially caught up to the amount of information that was contained in the two-sentence Netflix summary.
1:00:23: Now Ben Kingsley gets pulled over by a cop and has an essentially pointless conversation where he claims to be a former FBI agent. This was also mentioned earlier. Ben Kingsley sends Aaron Eckhart a message to come over to his weird basement deal. When he gets there, there's a filmstrip playing that basically says that Ben Kingsley really was in the FBI, in some sort of special experimental deal codenamed "Project Icarus" which isn't at all a retarded codename for a special project. Was "Project Hindenburg" already taken?
1:07:08: Ben Kingsley's doing his scribbling thing again, and seeing another psychic vision of what's probably another murder victim, only you can't tell because it's just a kid on a swing who then disappears and his mother starts frantically running around looking for him. During this time, Aaron Eckhart is tearing wallpaper off of a wall for some reason and revealing a mural of a black hole or some shit. Apparently the mural is of all of the murder victims that Ben Kingsley has psychically seen.
1:13:11: Now Aaron Eckhart is trying to convince Trinity and Boyd from Dollhouse that Ben Kingsley is a good guy. Now apparently he's chasing some trucker who's abducting little kids. Yes, all this is supposed to be happening in one part of New Mexico.
1:15:45: Aaron Eckhart starts tracking the child killer using his psychic visions or just happens to catch sight of him on the roadway (I can't tell). Then Ben Kingsley shows up and kidnaps Aaron Eckhart somehow.
1:18:33: Aaron Eckhart's hogtied on the floor and Ben Kingsley is yelling about killing him but doesn't for some reason. Then it cuts to them riding in a car where Ben Kingsley is talking about being psychic and how it sucks because he doesn't know how to not be psychic anymore and he's always seeing murder in his mind. What a crybaby.
1:22:34: They drive to a farm somewhere that has a ton of bodies buried in mounds in the backyard and then Ben Kingsley given Aaron Eckhart a gun and they start to chase the serial killer, who's driving a refrigerated truck. Everybody goes off the road and flips over for reasons that are not evident. Aaron Eckhart chases the serial killer guy on foot while Trinity saves the kidnapped kid. More fruity music plays in the background.
1:29:13: The serial killer trucker manages to get the drop on Aaron Eckhart even though Aaron Eckhart is chasing him through the desert, has a gun, and is psychic. Aaron Eckhart turns the tables and kills the serial killer with a big rock. Then Ben Kingsley drops to his knees and put Aaron Eckhart's gun to his head in an exact replica of the staging of the climactic scene from - yes - Seven.
1:33:15: Ben Kingsley goes into an outrageously hammy speech about how he wants to die because he can't take the psychic visions any more and how he wants Aaron Eckhart to take his place as the new psychic avenger or some such. Aaron Eckhart refuses to kill him, but then Ben Kingsley pulls out his knife to attack him and Trinity shoots him instead.
1:36:11: Ben Kingsley's final words: "So...tired." Me, too. This is one of the most incompetent movies I've ever seen. It's not entertaining-bad, it's hack film-student bad. It didn't even have the decency to shoehorn in a wildly implausible twist ending. Also, I never want to hear Native American music ever again.
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