HORSEMEN
(Review)

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’”
-- Revelation 6:7


There are certain recurring elements that seem to be thrown at the viewer when the standard serial killer thriller/procedural is on hand: among them, some Bible bits, and a slew of disturbingly gruesome kills.
Se7en did it.
Millennium did it. A lot.
So it is that it takes quite a lot for me to get worked up over a serial killer thriller/procedural these days.
Now we’ve got Jonas Åkerlund’s Horsemen, which, admittedly, attempts to take the sub-genre a little further than it’s traveled before.


I’ve been following Horsemen’s trail for quite awhile now, tuning into the project after it looked like Jaume Balaguero was going to direct it for Platinum Dunes.
That ultimately didn’t work out though, and Horsemen instead fell into the lap of Åkerlund, whose last feature was the frenetic entry in the canons of drug cinema, Spun.
I rather liked Spun, so when news broke that Åkerlund was in the director’s chair, I was still determined to check out Horsemen.
And now that I have seen it, I must admit that while some of it works, some of it doesn’t.


Det. Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid) is a troubled cop whose specialty—forensic odontology—brings him to the fore of a case that quickly reveals itself as one where the perpetrators display a distinct fixation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Cue Biblical bits (complete with expository chat with the neighbourhood priest, played by Paul Dooley) and disturbingly gruesome kills (courtesy of the awesome K.N.B. EFX).
Those aspects, and the view we get of Breslin’s struggles on the homefront, particularly his fractured relationship with teen son Alex (Southland Tales’ Lou Taylor Pucci), are what work in Horsemen.
There’s also an attempt to portray a complicated plan that’s compromised by the very human nature of its perpetrators; we eventually see where the scheme buckles, despite the intentions of its mastermind.


Where Horsemen doesn’t work though is in its underutilization of some very capable actors (among them, Clifton Collins, Jr. and Peter Stormare).
We get a fine performance from Patrick Fugit (who’d previously worked with Åkerlund on Spun), but it’s limited to a short portion of the film, playing almost like a vignette in the context of the entire narrative.
In fact, there are elements of the script (by Dave Callaham, who’s also written the script for Michael Cuesta’s Tell-Tale) that just don’t seem to reach any manner of resolution, among them, the subplot that involves Zhang Ziyi.
Then there’s that ending, which plays like such a Hollywood copout, the sort of ending that isn’t earned at all, but somehow feels tacked on.


Granted, the perpetrators have a point to make, motivations that transcend the usual psychopathology of your average movie serial killer, but in the end, Horsemen just doesn’t cohere as well as I’d hoped.
Disappointing, considering my fondness for Spun.
At any rate, Callaham’s script showed a certain level of ambition, so I can only hope that his screenplay for Tell-Tale (a contemporary update of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart") will likewise strive for something more than your average Hollywood horror thrills.


Parting shot: With Cuesta at the helm of Tell-Tale, my hopes for it rise even higher…

(Horsemen OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of bad-taste-it.)

WRISTCUTTERS:
A LOVE STORY
(Review)

Wristcutters: A Love Story opens with Zia (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit) cleaning up his room, before he proceeds to slit his wrists. But even as he lies bleeding to death, he sees a stray, sad little dust bunny which has managed to escape his attention, off in the corner…
Based on Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, Wristcutters is a black comedy that posits an afterlife for suicides which is pretty much identical to this world, except it’s worse; with a population made up entirely of people who’ve offed themselves, you can imagine it isn’t an awfully cheery place.
So Zia finds himself working at Kamikaze Pizza, and generally missing his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), till he meets Russian would-be rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, who appears in the upcoming horror films, Town Creek and Splinter), and subsequently discovers what happened to Desiree after his death, knowledge that propels him to go on a road trip to try and find the one thing he believes will make his current situation bearable.

Written and directed by Goran Dukic, Wristcutters takes this bizarre and intriguing premise and sadly, doesn’t do too much with it.
Yes, there are some amusing bits in here, and the final ten minutes or so are suffused with a melancholy that almost manages to move, but the vast majority of the film doesn’t live up to its premise. The narrative just doesn’t, excuse me, come alive; it fails to properly engage the viewer in Zia’s quest. Which is tragic, since the film’s concept really does have a lot of potential.

A large part of why Wristcutters didn’t work for me is the way Dukic fails to take full advantage of the road movie genre to create an involving narrative. A road movie, by its very nature, has a story that constantly moves forward, that gets characters from point A to point Zed, ultimately changed by the journey, transformed by velocity and geography.
The trouble with Wristcutters is that the journey doesn’t feel very transformative.
Once Zia leaves the city, the only time the film kicks into a passably interesting gear again is when Zia and company encounter Kneller (Tom Waits). The introduction of hitchhiker Mikal (Catacombs’ Shannyn Sossamon) doesn’t really do too much for the proceedings, even after we discover her motivation for traveling: she claims she’s here because of a mistake, and she’s looking for the people in charge to set things to right.

The major culprit I feel, is Dukic’s script, which doesn’t seem to afford moments and opportunities for the narrative to properly display who these characters are, and what they feel for each other.
For some reason which I can’t really pin down (beyond the fact that it’s also essentially a road movie), this reminded me of Liev Schreiber’s film adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated, except Schreiber’s effort exquisitely captured the right tone of epiphany and melancholy that I felt Wristcutters needed in order for it to work.
In the end, Wristcutters isn’t a terrible film, and it’s certainly more original than the average movie out there, whether indie or Hollywood. But because the central idea was so tantalizing, I just felt that there should have been something more substantial there than what I ultimately witnessed.

Parting shot: A review of Catacombs can be found in the Archive.

(Wristcutters: A Love Story OS courtesy of impawards.com.)