Mr. Brooks/Bug/Knocked Up (Theatrical Film Reviews)
Reviews by Chuck O'Leary
Mr. Brooks - If ever a movie epitomized the term
"overplotted," it is Mr.
Brooks. The film starts out promisingly with Kevin
Costner playing his first full-fledged villain, and William Hurt portraying his
evil id. However, the filmmakers clearly didn't have enough confidence in
their interesting Jekyll and Hyde main character, and instead decided to keep
adding plot on top of plot on top of plot. The title character, Earl Brooks
(Costner), is a wealthy, respected business owner who, for years,
has successful kept his dark side hidden from the rest of the world.
Brooks is actually an elusive, notorious serial-killer (nicknamed The
Thumbprint Killer) who wants to stop killing. The good side of
him uses the Alcoholics Anonymous program to quell his murderous
compulsions, but his bad side (represented by Hurt, who Costner and
the audience can see, but none of the other characters can) keeps goading him
into committing more murders. A psychological thriller devoted
entirely to a serial killer battling the dichotomous forces within himself
could have been fascinating, but co-writer/director Bruce A. Evans
makes the monumental mistake of taking the focus off of Costner
and Hurt, and introducing way too many needless subplots.
Before long, the film introduces a creepy witness (Dane Cook) to one of Brooks'
murders who, in the first of a series of unlikely developments, blackmails
Brooks into helping him commit his own murder. Then there's Demi
Moore as a super-rich girl turned police detective who's in the middle of a
nasty divorce, chasing the Thumbprint Killer and being threatened by another
killer she once put away who just escaped. And as if those aren't enough
plot threads to Juggle already, we're given another subplot about Brooks'
college-age daughter (Danielle Panabaker), who might have inherited some of
daddy's homicidal genes and be a killer herself. Where the hell did
that come from? Despite good work by Costner and Hurt, Mr. Brooks ends up being a
ludicrous mess. Rating: 4 out of 10
Bug - No relation to the 1975 film of the same name with
Bradford Dillman and electrified cockroaches, the 2007 Bug is a William Friedkin-directed
psychological thriller based on Tracy Letts' 1996 stage play. In her
best performance in years, Ashley Judd stars as Agnes White, a
substance-abusing cocktail waitress living at a remote motel
somewhere in the desert Southwest. When we first meet her, she's having a
lesbian relationship with her best friend (Lynn Collins), and trying
to fend off an abusive former boyfriend (Harry Connick Jr.) just back
from prison. Things start taking a strange turn after
she lets a kindly drifter named Peter Evans (Michael Shannon reprising his
stage role) stay the night. Turns out Peter is a Persian Gulf War
veteran AWOL from the Army who claims government doctors were using him as
a human guinea pig.
Peter insists that the government purposely infected his blood
with tiny insects and Agnes' motel room has become infested with these
"bugs." Soon the vulnerable Agnes becomes swept up in Peter's
paranoid delusions and hallucinations. Or are they really delusions and
hallucinations? Essentially a filmed play that unfolds within a single
room, Friedkin's Bug
is a claustrophobic, unsettling, intense and extremely well-acted
parable about paranoia. Going against everything considered
commercial nowadays, it's a good head trip of a movie that also makes an
increasingly relevant point that the more technologically advanced society
becomes, the harder it is for the individual to have basic privacy
rights. The now 71-year-old Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Rules of Engagement, The Hunted) is one of a just a
handful of veteran filmmakers remaining who continues to do interesting work
and make real movies. Rating: 7 out of 10
Knocked Up - This is writer-director Judd Apatow's
not-nearly-as-funny follow-up to his 2005 sleeper hit, The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Here
his main character is another arrested development type named Ben Stone (Seth
Rogen), a twentysomething slacker who lives with a bunch of fellow slackers who
dream of one day creating a website devoted to listing the nude scenes of
famous actresses -- we're expected to believe they're all dense enough
never to have heard of Mr. Skin. One night he meets the pretty, upwardly
mobile Alison (Katherine Heigl) at a bar, where Alison proceeds
to get drunk enough to sleep with him later that night. The central joke
of the movie is that Alison finds herself pregnant with Ben's child, and the
responsibility-challenged Ben has no idea how to deal with it. Knocked Up has some sporadic
laughs, but Ben and especially his roommates are just too gross to be the
kind of charming free spirits Apatow thinks they are. We're also
expected to believe that Alison wouldn't be equally repulsed by these
losers. Crude as it often is, Knocked
Up is another instantly forgettable romantic comedy about two
not especially empathetic characters who should never end up
together. A few weeks after seeing it, this one is already fast
evaporating from memory. And with an overlong running time of
132 minutes (especially overlong for a comedy), it overstays its welcome by at
least a half-hour. Rating: 5 out of 10
