Brooks Report

This weekend's other major film offering, Mr. Brooks, is not a "bad" movie. It's just not a particularly good one. Strangely, it almost is a victim of high expectations, even though I can't say I had many expectations at all when I went to see it.

The expectations develop very quickly though, as the movie starts to unfold in a way that is evocative of many other kinds of movies. It's sort of like a script blender into which elements of movies from The Silence of the Lambs to Copycat to several other "serial killer movies" in between were thrown. Not that I started expecting the movie would reach the creative heights of those films. But I did feel that if the writers were doing everything short of name-checking those other good movies, they might have a creative idea or two of their own to toss into the soup.

No such luck. Every element of Mr. Brooks feels like something you've seen done better in some other movie. And there are lots of elements. It reaches an almost "superhero sequel" level of cramming in too many subplots to pay off emotionally in the alloted time. There's a father/daughter plot, a student/mentor plot, a detective on the hunt plot, and the inner psychosis of the lead character and his ongoing dialog with his imaginary alter ego. None of it is outright bad, but none of it amounts to much, and the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

In short, the movie feels like a script based on an existing book -- even though it wasn't. You get the sense that hundreds of pages were cut from some larger manuscript that would have given more emotional weight to what was happening, but it was all excised to fit a two-hour running time.

One bright spot that helped things a bit was a great performance from William Hurt as the killer's inner psyche. An actor of his skill is frankly slumming it a bit to play such a one-note character, but he elevated the material he had. (And said material wasn't much. Any given episode of Battlestar Galactica uses Baltar and Six to portray a far more intriguing broken-man-and-his-imaginary-Id relationship.)

The movie rates a middle of the road C.