BEFORE: It's the day of palindromes, as three elements of my tracking system can be read the same backwards and forwards. Day 343 of the year, and it's 12/9/21 - and it's movie #3,993 overall, which means I'm just four films from Big Movie 4,000 - I kind of wish I had more control over how a year's going to end, because that should be some kind of super blockbuster to commemorate the occasion, but I'm afraid it's not going to be, just an average sort of Christmas-ish movie. I hope it's not a letdown for me or for you. But hey, it'll be Christmas, so good cheer and all that, and hitting a milestone like 4,000 movies should be its own reward, at least from an OCD standpoint. I'll feel some sense of accomplishment, hopefully - but that will probably be tempered by the fact that then I'll have to abstain from movies for the next two weeks, waiting for January 1 to start the cycle over again. Guess I'll catch up on "Hawkeye" or season 2 of "Tiger King" or something.
Keanu Reeves carries over from "Knock Knock", and it's sort of a last-minute addition to Keanu's stats for the year - he was already in three romance-themed movies in February, and then the new "Bill & Ted" movie later in the year, and now three more films in December. He can't possibly win the year at this point, it's too little, too late - but he could still make the Top 20, that's not too bad. Actors who focus on romances and/or horror films seem to have an inside track according to my organizational system - but they can't beat U.S. Presidents and talk-show hosts, who appear in so many documentaries, via archive footage.
THE PLOT: An FBI agent tracking a serial killer gives up all hope of solving the crimes and moves to another city. After he's settled in, the old acquaintance makes himself known and resumes sending him pictures of his next victim.
AFTER: I'll admit it, I'm in a bit of a movie funk, here at the end of the year. Maybe it's because I programmed a bunch of action films about criminals, bank robbers and serial killers, also the men who track them down. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, people who stalk lonely horny architects or the doctor who couldn't save their father after the accident, then torture them. Really, why are we making films about these characters, do they even deserve it? Elsewhere, people are robbing banks and pulling diamond heists, and thinking that's OK if they just give 1/3 of the money to charity. Or they're obsessing over Instagram celebrities, spying on people in hotel rooms or thinking that they're clones of their own grandmother, and I just feel like I can't make sense of it all, it's much too big and way too weird.
(I'm supposed to be addressing my Christmas cards, buying gifts and planning a holiday trip, but I'm up late at night watching films about sociopaths, it just doesn't feel right. I know this chain of films leads to Christmas stuff, I can't wait to get there and have that pull me out of this funk, I hope. Maybe I should watch that Beatles docu-series just to feel something good and positive in the world again.)
That poster above for "The Watcher" really says it all - the villain is depicted as a shadowy hooded figure. A blank, essentially. Why does he kill women? Who knows, but it hardly matters, that would count as character motivation, and we really don't have the time or the budget to worry about that. Let's just take it as a fact that he DOES kill women, and move on from there. What's the connection between him and the stressed-out FBI agent? Well, there is one, but we don't learn about it until MUCH later in the game, almost too late. All that matters is that the bad man sends the good man a photo of the woman he's stalking, and that gives the good man 24 hours to prevent the crime. No, of course it doesn't make much sense, neither does the Joker or the Riddler sending Batman cryptic information about their next heists, to see if the Dark Knight can stop it in time. It's a foible, a weakness, and it's the stuff of fiction, because the real bad people in this world just go out and DO the thing, they don't send information to the cops or the FBI or the press until afterwards. Yeah, we had the Zodiac killer and the Unabomber, and they wrote their manifestos, but eventually they got caught through other methods. (Wait, I forget, did they catch the Zodiac killer? I guess not. They got the Golden State Killer and the BTK Killer, though.)
FBI Agent Campbell is hardly perfect, he takes too many substances like sleeping pills, tranquilizers and I think maybe peanut m&m's just to relax at night, and keep the nightmares of past cases away. He also sees a therapist twice a week, and on the casting alone, you can bet that's probably going to be important later in the film. For whatever reason, he walked away from the FBI and started his life over in Chicago, only to have serial killer David Griffin follow him there and keep their game of cat and mouse going. Griffin is very outgoing and dynamic, which is maybe why you cast Keanu Reeves in that role, but do we really want to see surfer dude Ted "Theodore" Logan as a murderer? No, we really do not. There are reports that Keanu Reeves was "tricked" into starring in this movie, I guess maybe back then it wasn't that hard to rope him in? He'd just been in "The Matrix" and was maybe trying to transition from comic roles to more serious action-oriented ones. Hey, it was the turn of the millennium, it was a confusing time for all of us.
But this is all so very BASIC - this was back before FBI profilers were doing genetic profiling to find serial killers not in the system based on the DNA of their relatives, or other complex things like that. This was boots-on-the-ground, canvassing witnesses for information, trying to identify where this photo was taken sort of detective work. Sitting in unmarked cars for long periods of time with a telephoto lens, tapping phone lines and knocking on all the doors in a neighborhood, hoping to get lucky. Hey, let's put the photo of that woman on the evening news and hope that one of her friends or family members will call the hotline, it sounds crazy, I know, but it just might work. These days an AMBER alert goes out to millions of smartphones at once, so chances of spotting that blue Toyota Celica are pretty darn good.
It's too bad that following a serial killer for ten (?) years and trying to learn everything about him only gets you so far, because then even though they've spoken on the phone many times, Agent Campbell doesn't even recognize Griffin when they share an elevator together. Jeez, the guy's not stupid, don't you imagine that he'd recognize his VOICE when they share pleasantries in that elevator? COME ON! And then the many chases and almost captures throughout Chicagoland mean NOTHING when the two agree to meet face-to-face at the grave of one of his victims. ("Hey, aren't you the guy from that elevator?"). This doesn't even make a bit of sense, because we were told that the killer operated out of Los Angeles for many years, why is one of his victims buried in a Chicago cemetery?
Like "Marauders", this film seems to have all the required elements in place, like some writer just went down a checklist or something, but it's all so poorly ORGANIZED. Like we've got the pieces of a good movie, potentially, but they just don't fit together right, or at all. Shouldn't there be somebody like a script supervisor or a studio executive that can say to a director, "Hey, this bit here where the adversaries meet in the cemetery, does this, you know, WORK?" when it just doesn't.
Another example - Campbell calls the phone number of a possible victim, and after many rings, Griffin answers the phone. This proves Campbell is too late, and probably dead, but Campbell instructs the police to "Trace this call!" Why? You dialed the number yourself, you know the address of the victim, what's the point of tracing the call? I'm scratching my head, here - doesn't the screenwriter know that you only trace a phone call when you don't know the location of the party on the other end of the line?
Also starring James Spader (last seen in "Shorts"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Ernie Hudson (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Chris Ellis (last seen in "The Oath"), Robert Cicchini, Yvonne Niami, Jenny McShane, Rebekah Louise Smith. Gina Alexander, Joseph Sikora, Jillian Peterson, Michele DiMaso, Andrew Rothenberg, David Pasquesi (last seen in "Return to Me"), Marilyn Dodds Frank, Shela Coleman, Michael Guido, Mindy Bell
RATING: 3 out of 10 visits to that terrible Vietnamese restaurant
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