BEFORE: I'm going from hipsters to Republicans to serial killers. Nothing in common except those are three groups of people I would rather not associate with.
Michael Kelly carries over from "Fair Game". I realize now with tonight's cast list that I could have flipped the last three films around, and "Book of Henry" would have linked here also - and if I had flipped them, I think I could have fit in one more film, because Jacob Tremblay also links to Julia Roberts via the film "Wonder". But then, squeezing in one more film would have thrown off my count, and I wouldn't hit July 4 with the film I want to land there. So maybe it's for the best, I just need to find another way to get back to "Wonder" in the future.
THE PLOT: A tight-knit team of rising investigators, along with their supervisor, is suddenly torn apart when they discover that one of their own teenage daughters has been brutally murdered.
AFTER: It made linking sense to split off another Nicole Kidman film from the herd - I'll still try to get to the remaining 5 in November, but there's just no way to guarantee that. I'll have to see how many slots I have left when I get there.
This is another one of those films that tries to do a split-timeline thing - half of the action takes place in 2002 (and ties in nicely with the previous film, with terrorist suspects possibly trying to get their hands on enriched yellow cake uranium) and the other half is set in 2015, when a murder case is re-opened. One of the investigators has continued to work the case in-between, but since that work is presumed to be boring - scanning thousands of mugshots from around the country - it's neatly left out of the film. So the action toggles between the two timelines, but the main problem here is, doing so brings nothing new to the table, it just makes everything more confusing as the details are revealed, little by little. Yep, chances are that this was done not to be "innovative" but to cover up some narrative problems that resulted from presenting the scenes in a regular linear form.
The most recent narrative to pull this sort of trick, of course, is "Westworld". Fans during the first season somehow figured out that two different timelines were being presented simultaneously, as if everything was all happening at the same time, even though it wasn't. Silly me, scenes are presented to me in a particular order, and I'm inclined to believe that they also happened in that order, unless I'm presented with evidence to the contrary. Congratulations, makers of "Westworld", you fooled me, I hope you're proud of yourselves. Now in season 2, I'm supposed to understand that when I see a certain actor, in some scenes he's a real human person (in the past) and in other scenes he's a robot (in the present). I'm on to your tricks now, and I read the recaps online after each episode so I don't miss things like that. (Really? I was supposed to figure this out from the fact that in some scenes his beard is SLIGHTLY less trimmed? Give me a break. Nobody should have to work this hard to watch a TV show...)
So there's something of the same effect here, since in the past scenes the assistant DA has strawberry blonde hair and in the present day scenes her hair is more yellow blonde. But there was so much toggling back and forth that after a while my brain gave up and stopped asking whether I was looking at THEN or NOW, it was just too much work. Just tell me everything that happened and I'll try to piece it all together at the end. As best as I can tell:
In 2015, the lead investigator, though he left L.A. years ago to return to NY, has stumbled on the image of a man who greatly resembled the chief suspect in a murder case, and this man's been in jail for the last 10 years, ever since the suspect disappeared, so the timeline matches up, even if this man has a different name, the investigator is convinced it's him, and he's willing to bend the rules in order to prove it. Turns out you can't get a warrant on a hunch like this.
In the past, while one part of the team was trying to solve this murder case (even though they're not the homicide division, and since one of their team members was related to the victim, they really should have been pulled off this case...) another part of the team was hampering their efforts, because he was trying to protect his source, who was part of this terrorist sleeper cell. So apparently if you're giving valuable information to the police, you can also commit a violent crime and skate on that, which seems ridiculous. His protection would only extend to the crimes related to the information he's providing, and if he does something else wrong, he's still on the hook for that. A whistle-blower who helps uncover insider trading, for example, would still be liable if he committed a hit-and-run.
But justice seems to be a fuzzy concept here, only people seem to know it when they see it, and I think this is one of those things we're not supposed to notice because of all the time-jumping. Ultimately the movie is forced to answer the question of whether the guy with the different name who greatly resembles the original suspect is the original suspect or not, and I'll give the film credit for doing this in a unique way, but it still counts as cinematic trickery.
NITPICK POINT: I've watched enough episodes of "Law & Order" to realize that you probably can't get someone to confess that way.
Also starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Triple 9"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "Money Monster"), Dean Norris (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Zoe Graham (last seen in "Boyhood"), Lyndon Smith (last seen in "The Forger"), Joe Cole, Don Harvey (last seen in "Vice"), Mark Famiglietti (last seen in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"), Ross Partridge, Kim Yarbrough, Alessandro Cuomo.
RATING: 4 out of 10 stolen cars
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