When I was watching this movie I almost became convinced that they had made it ten years earlier, 1997-ish, and then just forgot to release it until 2007. It has Kevin Costner, William Hurt, and Demi Moore in starring roles? Doesn't sound like the late 2000's. The only hole in my theory was Dane Cook playing the fourth lead until I remembered that he's been acting forever; I first saw him as Dennis Rodman's sidekick in Simon Sez in 1999, which has the dubious distinction of being #83 on IMDB's Bottom 100 List at the time I write this. I guess it doesn't really matter when this movie was made. It got made. It got released. I watched it.
Costner plays the Portland Chamber of Commerce's Man of the Year, Earl Brooks, who has the nasty little habit of sometimes murdering people. He tries not to let it interfere with his family life, which includes his adoring wife played by Marg Helgenberger or his flaky, pregnant-by-a-married-man college dropout daughter played by, let me look this up, Danielle Panabaker. He has no connection to any of his crimes, so nobody really has any reason to suspect him, but this dude acts extremely suspicious all the damn time. I wrote down one of his early lines because his delivery was so robotic, so other-worldly, it almost sounded like he was reading poetry even though it was this simple line: "I thought the food tonight was very good but I was not crazy about the dessert."
Costner sounds so much like a robot, even by Costner standards, that I thought his business must be a robot factory, until he mentioned that it was actually, please sit down for this, a box factory. Yeah, that's right, a box factory! Please spend the rest of the movie at this box factory I asked, but alas, it was not meant to be, for there were only a handful of scenes at his office and only one on the actual factory floor. They really shouldn't have played down the box factory angle. Say 'box factory' once out loud and you're automatically happy. Maybe that's why they tried to downplay it, because the film does seem to be going for an overall restrained, rain-soaked pace to suit its setting and material. Box factory.
I use this expression all the time, but Demi Moore feels like she wandered in from another movie. She's the homicide detective hunting The Fingerprint Killer and she's not your typical detective. She's fighting over alimony with her ex-husband, but in a nice twist, he wants money from her! It seems he is just a simple restaurateur and she is the millionaire daughter of a local fat-cat so he thinks he's entitled to a few of her millions... uh... okay whatever. Demi Moore actually seems to spend most of the movie dealing with other stupid shit that isn't Kevin Costner.
A previous criminal Moore locked up, who earned the moniker The Hangman because he liked to leave tortured victims hanging from public places, has escaped and periodically shows up to tackle her into a van and try to murder her. She escapes by flying out of the van at breakneck speed and slamming through the windshield of a taxi cab. I feel like a gorgeous, millionaire homicide detective being kidnapped in front of her own police station by a serial killer and then escaping about a minute later by hurtling herself through the air into glass might become a national news story; I can see the cable channels picking that one up.
Costner wants to concentrate less on killing and more on anything else, but his conscience, played by William Hurt, follows him everywhere and goads him into base acts. Hurt wears a very distracting little scarf thing tied around his neck the whole movie. It almost looks like if you rolled up a bow tie around your neck and then just tied a knot in it. Costner only seems to have one emotion the whole movie: clinically dead. It makes it even creepier when his daughter sits in his lap and coos 'daddy' at him when she explains how she got knocked up and dropped out of school. There are brief flashes of acting from Costner, like unnatural bursts of laughter, or the creepy little dance he does when he kills people that ends with him pantomiming an orgasm, but otherwise he is one stone-faced son of a bitch.
Our anti-hero isn't really provided with any motivation for his killings. He argues with Hurt about whether or not he needs to kill, and whether he can resist it. There's an early scene where Costner sits with his wife and zones out while she prattles on about dogs and he stares into a window across the street and dreams about murdering people. I guess this guy was really sick of his wife always yak-yak-yakking but instead of being rude and interrupting her, he decided he would just take out his frustrations elsewhere, later.
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