BEFORE: OK, so I left ONE Nicolas Cage movie in January, and re-scheduled the rest for March. Why this one? Because it also has Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson in it, and I therefore had to decide whether to count this as a Nic Cage movie or as a 50 Cent movie. Well, I had one slot left, so filling that slot will help me land the start of the romance chain square on February 1. Therefore, this counts as a 50 Cent movie, simple as that.
Plus, an additional actor carries over from "Fire with Fire", and I think two more actors (in addition to 50 Cent) will carry over tomorrow, those are all signs that maybe this film belongs HERE and not THERE, but it probably would have worked out either way, thanks to so much overlap. I've checked my possible outros to the Nicolas Cage chain, so in late March I should have plenty of options, since I can watch all the Nic Cage films in whatever order gives me the final link I want. So yeah, I'm kind of top of all of this.
The only sacrifice is that "The Frozen Ground" had to be separated from the rest of the herd, but, hey, it's January so a film set in Anchorage, Alaska seems sort of seasonally appropriate.
THE PLOT: An Alaska state trooper partners with a young woman who escaped the clutches of serial killer Robert Hansen to bring the murderer to justice. Based on actual events.
AFTER: Something a little different tonight, this is kind of like a true-crime procedural drama, a there really was a serial killer in Alaska named Robert Hansen. Hansen was a baker, a loner, a veteran, a hunter, a bi-polar schizophrenic and a part-time thief and arsonist. Oh, and he was responsible for the abduction, rape and murder of at least 17 women, the question of course is how he got away with this for so long - I mean, yeah, if he killed all the women he abducted, that would explain a lot, but nobody investigated the disappearances of so many women in the Anchorage area over this period of time? He had two children with his second wife, but the family apparently took a lot of trips without him - that alone speaks volumes about him - and during those periods, he would abduct women and keep them in his basement dungeon.
So, yeah, this isn't a very happy or positive film, except for near the end, when he finally gets caught and the Alaska State Troopers get to search his house, and are able to build a case against him, thanks to the testimony of one prostitute, Cindy, who managed to escape while Hansen was loading his sea plane to get ready to take her out to his murder cabin in the woods. She even left her sneakers in his car as evidence of her abduction, however nobody in the Anchorage Police Department would believe her story, simply because she was a hooker, and as far as they knew, Robert Hansen was a fine, upstanding member of the community.
Obviously the film had to change some of the names of the people involved, but there was an Alaskan State Trooper, perhaps similar to the one played by Nicolas Cage here, who had been involved with the investigation around dead bodies found around Anchorage, Seward and the surrounding valleys. Forensics teams noticed similarities in the ways that the victims were killed and buried, so it's great when different agencies contact each other and solve crimes based on patterns, but then of course tying these crimes to specific individuals, doing profiling work, plus the research involved in finding similar cases and possible connections, that's what takes a long time, most likely.
In this case, the FBI profile of the killer indicated someone with hunting experience, low self-esteem and a history of being rejected by women, somebody with a stutter and a compulsion to keep souvenirs from his victims. Oh, and probably somebody with their own plane. Maybe that's not a lot to work with, but eventually this did lead investigators to Robert Hansen, and a warrant to search his house, car and plane. After stumbling on a marked map of his "hunting" locations, it then just became a matter of confronting him with the evidence during interrogation.
The filmmakers here (same studio as most of the Bruce Willis films from last week, EFO Films) did their best to make this exciting, but all things considered, most police investigative work probably isn't as exciting as many movies would have you believe. Stakeouts, profiling suspects, gaining the trust of witnesses, and even conducting interrogations aren't as visually interesting as shootouts and explosions, and this little problem is probably tough for any "action" film to overcome and still be true to the real story. Still, I know that procedural podcasts are a big thing now, I'm not sure why they're so popular compared to, say, movies on the same topic, but that's where we find ourselves. Last year I watched that 6-episode mini-series "I'll Be Gone in the Dark", which was about Patton Oswalt's late wife, Michelle McNamara, doing a lot of the profiling research for a true-crime novel that led to the identification of the Golden State Killer, I enjoyed that series quite a bit, so I sort of get it.
And while seasonally appropriate, the subject matter of this film is still very much a bummer, so it didn't really help alleviate my Seasonal Affective Disorder, although it could make you feel happy to just be alive, in some sense, I suppose.
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), John Cusack (last seen in "The Grifters"), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Radha Mitchell (last seen in "The Shack"), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Dean Norris (last seen in "The Hustle"), Katherine LaNasa (last seen in "Alfie" (2004)), Matt Gerald (last seen in "Faster"), Robert Forgit, Ryan O'Nan (last seen in "Marauders"), Kurt Fuller (last seen in "The New Guy"), Kevin Dunn (also carrying over from "Fire With Fire"), Gia Mantegna (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Michael McGrady, Brad William Henke (last seen in "North Country"), Bostin Christopher (last seen in "Harriet"), Olga Valentina (last seen in "Extraction" (2015)), Jason Collins, Taylor Ann Tracy, Ron Holmstrom, Leo Grinberg, Katie Wallack (last seen in "Like Crazy"), Brett Baker, Mark Robokoff, Jill Bess, with cameos from Lydia Hull (also last seen in "Extraction" (2015)), Mark Rhino Smith (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen")
RATING: 5 out of 10 animal-head hunting trophies
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