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E. Elias Merhige clearly has a thing for creepy bald guys. The director
follows his Max Schreck biopic (Shadow of the Vampire) with Suspect Zero, a
film incessantly referred to by lazy critics as "Se7en meets The Silence of
the Lambs.only not as good," when it is, in fact, simply another film about
a creepy bald guy.
Willem Dafoe is replaced here by Ben Kingley (of Thunderbirds fame), who
plays an extreme nutter called Benjamin O'Ryan. Not only is O'Ryan scary to
look at, he can also do this weird, government-sanctioned thing where he can
visualize - with the help of what sounds like the new Jim O'Rourke album -
an event happening thousands of miles away. This, theoretically, helps O'
Ryan aid the government in the capture of serial killers. But the
freakazoid has clearly snapped, and taken the law into his own hands.
Surely his life would be different had he been a regular viewer of The
People's Court.
Meanwhile, mild-mannered FBI agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart,
Paycheck) has just finished a six-month suspension for fucking up a huge
case involving a mass-murderer, but still finds himself "demoted" from the
Dallas office to a hole in the wall in Albuquerque (sounds like a lateral
move to me, but then again, I would have taken the route to Pismo Beach and
all the clams I could eat). Mackelway chews aspirin like candy, gets
strange faxes about missing children, and eventually falls into another huge
case involving a serial killer. It's so huge, the Bureau calls in his
ex-lover from Dallas (Carrie-Anne Moss, The Matrix Revolutions) to, so far
as I could see, stand around make it impossible for viewers to say, "Hey,
did you notice there weren't any women in this movie?"
If you haven't seen Zero's trailer, consider yourself lucky because it
reveals most of the film's story. If you have, it probably doesn't matter
because little in Zero makes much sense. Merhige knows how to make with the
creepy visuals, and Pop Will Eat Itself's Clint Mansell contributes another
decent, moody score. As far as the acting goes, Kingsley is always fun to
watch, but Eckhart does little to expand on the whole Tortured Cop thing
that has been better so many other times. Moss may as well have been made
out of cardboard.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38542 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1313450 X-RT-TitleID: 1135280 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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