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You know that Rear Window spoof episode of The Simpsons in which a wheelchair-bound Bart is convinced Ned Flanders has murdered his wife? Imagine a feature-film version of that particular episode, and that will give you a pretty good background for Frailty, the nifty directorial debut from wooden actor Bill Paxton. The similarities are too much to ignore, even before the Todd Flanders character starts belting out "I've Got the Joy," with accompaniment by the Rod Flanders character.
Frailty is set in present day, but most of it is shown via flashback to 1979. It all starts when Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey, The Wedding Planner) walks into a Dallas FBI office and announces he has information about the identity of that state's infamous yet unsolved "Hands of God" serial killings. He begins to tell his story to initially skeptical Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe, Men of Honor), who just goes through the motions until parts of Meiks's story actually start to check out. Meiks claims his brother Adam was the man responsible for the killings and that the same brother recently offed himself.
Through the flashbacks, we learn the bizarre story of the Meiks clan. Aside from the death of their matriarch, they seem like a pretty normal bunch of Texans. Dad (Paxton, Vertical Limit) works at a garage, and 12-year-old Fenton (Matthew O'Leary, Domestic Disturbance) takes care of little brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) after school until Dad gets home. They don't seem like an overly religious household until one fateful evening when Dad announces that he was visited by an angel who told him his family had been chosen to help kill demons. Trouble is, these demons look just like regular folk, and a few days later ol' Dad plays Moses, emerging from the mountains (or from underneath the car he's been working on) with a list of people he and his kids are supposed to exterminate.
Adam thinks the whole thing is kind of cool ("Like superheroes, Dad?"), but Fenton is really freaked out. He knows his dad has probably gone off the deep end but is too scared to drop dime on him. Needless to say, he doesn't feel much better about it when Dad brings the first victim home. The adult Fenton explains it all to Agent Doyle, who is just as suspicious as we are (he must have recently watched The Usual Suspects and noticed the similarities between his own situation and that of Chazz Palmineri's Dave Kujan).
Frailty is a slick, creepy little film that should do well for the careers of Paxton (as a director and an actor), debut screenwriter Brent Hanley and, most of all, youngster O'Leary, who was so good he made my stomach ache. Paxton must have been taking notes as he was being directed by greats like Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan) and James Cameron (Titanic, True Lies, Aliens) because he sure knows what he's doing, and even offers a few wicked-cool scene transitions from past to present like John Sayles used in Lone Star. This is the first feature Paxton has directed, but he previously helmed one of the most important pieces of film the world has ever seen - the music video for Barnes & Barnes' "Fish Heads."
Frailty reminded me a lot of Night of the Hunter, with religion acting as the basis for false prophecy and the ills attendant thereto. It's nowhere near as powerful as that film (though Paxton does cobble things together in such a way as to never show the viewer any blood or gore), but there's still something wrong with you if you don't get the chills during the scene where Dad lightly scolds young Adam for making his own Demon List, topped by the bully giving him trouble at school (it probably read "Bart Simpson").
1:40 - R for violence and some language
========== X-RAMR-ID: 31502 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 302495 X-RT-TitleID: 1113447 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 7/10
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