BEFORE: This would have been a fabulous time to stay on topic and watch "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol", especially since Brendan Gleeson from "Safe House" was also in "Mission Impossible II" with Tom Cruise. But as I said the other night, it's not on premium cable yet, not available for rental on iTunes or Amazon, and the $5.99 DVD store had it, but at the outrageous price of $15.99 for a DVD/Blu-Ray combo. That's outside my budget, if I paid that much for a film each day, I'd eventually go broke. So this is a substitute film, a bit of a step backwards to serial killers, but at least this film also features Brendan Gleeson.
I'll feel really stupid and cheesed off if that "Mission Impossible" film debuts on cable 2 weeks from now...
THE PLOT: When a madman begins committing horrific murders inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's works, a young Baltimore detective joins forces with Poe to stop him from making his stories a reality.
AFTER: I went into this one with high hopes, because I got really into Poe when I was in junior high. I read the complete works, not just "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" but also "Hop Frog", "The Gold Bug", "Murders in the Rue Morgue", and "The Fall of the House of Usher". Even if you put aside his contributions to gothic horror, the man earns praise for writing what is regarded as the first detective story. And after writing "The Raven", "The Bells", and "Annabel Lee", they re-named POE-ms after him - before that, they were just called "verses". OK, I made up that last factoid.
Also, he was a drunk, but this fact is well-known. This only increases my admiration of the man, however. According to this film, he was also a self-centered arrogant bastard obsessed with his level of fame. You know, a writer. And it happens that no one really knows what took place in the last days of Poe's life, so someone saw fit to fill them with a battle of wits with a deranged killer. And perhaps it takes one twisted genius to catch another.
Once again, we see that this is what Hollywood knows about serial killers - that they're obsessive compulsives, they kill according to an unbreakable pattern (Poe stories this time) and in so doing they must taunt the police and leave clues to their identity. Oh, plus they're nasty creeps who can hide in plain sight.
But this is what I found more interesting - what happens to a creative person (writer, director, artist) when there's nothing left in the tank? When everything he tries to create fails to match the quality of his previous successes? Would he himself be painfully aware of this fact, or would his perception of his own talent fail him as well? It's ironic, perhaps that here Poe has to be concerned instead with someone using the framework of his own stories to stage murder scenes, and even though this is appalling, it re-sparks his creative genius.
It's a bit of clever to set a mystery back in Poe's time, before fingerprinting and most other modern forensics were in use. Also, being set before the development of the light bulb means that all of the night scenes (about 95% of the film, all the best stuff happens after dark...) are mostly in shadows, which just amps up the creepy factor even more. However, this also meant I had to watch a couple key scenes over and over, just because it was so hard to discern what was going on in the dark.
Part of me wishes I had saved this film for Halloween time, but the other part thinks it belongs right here in the countdown. After all, I've got a nice little unintended secondary theme going on, at least back to "Miami Blues" - and that is the dichotomy between good and evil, represented by two main characters. "Collateral" - same deal, the hitman and the cabbie, also "Taking Lives" and "The Bone Collector" were also mental games involving a cop and a killer, ditto for "Ricochet". OK, "Safe House" was a little off the mark, but only because the spy thing was so confusing it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But that still represented a dichotomy between the two spies, old and young. Will this continue in the week ahead?
Also starring John Cusack (last heard in "Anastasia"), Luke Evans (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (2011)), Alice Eve (last seen in "Stage Beauty"), Kevin McNally (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides").
RATING: 8 out of 10 stagehands
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