After a surprisingly successful burst of horror movies dominated the box office from August to March, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a few mediocre thrillers bunching up early in the year.
Both “Perfect Window” and “Taking Lives” are decent films with their own strengths, but ultimately they’re not distinguishable from the crowd. Neither film displays the subtle malignance of genre displacement and cinematic/story-telling reflexivity of Eli Roth’s “Cabin Fever.” Neither delves into the comedic over-exaggeration that made “Dawn of the Dead” a horrifyingly fun feast of flesh.
“Perfect Window” is the greater disappointment by far, simply because the first two-thirds of the film are delightfully well done. By the time the flick wusses out at the 70-minute mark, you’ll be steaming in your seat.
Johnny Depp, just off of his “Pirates of the Caribbean” high, delivers an incredible role as Mort Rainey. Depp does a whole lot with a very little here. Rainey is a troubled writer cocooning himself in his deep forest hideaway as his impending divorce eats away at his creative powers. Rainey is pure Stephen King material (the film is based on a King short story), similar to other misfit writer characters from King’s oeuvre (especially “The Shining”), in which the prolific fiction magus has channeled every one of his worst fears a thousand times before.
But Depp manages to entertain while Rainey basically runs around an empty house (he does have a dog, but man’s best friend never lasts too long in this type of thriller), taking naps at an almost inhuman rate. When a mysterious bumpkin named Shooter (a marvelously quirky John Turturro, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) pops up and claims that Rainey stole one of his stories, everything goes wonderfully awry. Decent thrills ensue, but “Secret Window” can’t handle its own well-crafted frights and pretty much fizzles into utter suckdom for its final half-hour. I won’t give away any endings here, but anybody who has seen any thriller made in the last few years should see this finale coming on like a jetliner on the highway.
Director David Koepp can’t really catch a break. His better films “The Trigger Effect” and “Stir of Echoes” were criminally overlooked, and now he’s blessed with Johnny Depp and lands a script that can’t quite deliver. Any Depp fan will love it, but this isn’t the best Stephen King adaptation out there, and unfortunately that doesn’t say all that much.
Angelina Jolie as an F.B.I. profiler on the trail of a serial killer in Canada doesn’t fare much better in D.J. Caruso’s “Taking Lives.” As mainly a television director, Caruso is still iffy with the cinematic equivalent of primetime crime drama. I’d heard someone describe this film as a really good episode of “C.S.I.” with a lot of naked Angelina, and that pretty much sums it up.
Every character is paper-thin, and all the Canadians seem to either worship or despise their American godsend agent, but either way the Canadians come off as insufficient crime fighters with muddy accents. Angelina as Illeana, the special agent who eats her dinner staring at crime scene photos, is slightly more interesting.
Illeana discovers the “hermit crab killer,” a demented serial killer who has been killing a string of young men over twenty years and basically taking over their lives. From a growing pile of grotesquely mutilated victims emerges a frightened-off-his-face art dealer named Costa (Ethan Hawke, “Training Day”), who helps Illeana track the killer and learn to loosen up, literally. A few series of delightfully frightening sequences take place in dark basements and deserted apartments, but a slight dullness pervades the entire film.
The main problem is that although “Taking Lives” is full of seemingly purposeful action and smarter-than-thou criminal trickery, there are enough plot holes to bleed this film dry. Didn’t Kiefer Sutherland’s character seem to be a tad bit too perfectly set up? How did the killer show up at all the jump-out-of-nowhere moments?
The film doesn’t answer all the questions it forces the audience to ask and comes up short as a result, but the finale had the entire theater cringing (in a “Kill Bill: Volume One” sort of way), and I’ve got to respect that. But in the end, our heroine proves to bear inhuman amounts of intelligence and the killer somehow morphs into an idiotically obsessive and criminally clumsy bum. This is no “Silence of the Lambs” (not even as good as “Red Dragon”), but it probably beats watching reruns of “N.Y.P.D. Blue.”
Both “Secret Window” and “Taking Lives” are bearable, but neither rate among the recent must-see films at theaters now, like Michel Gondry’s intrepid dreamscape of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” So unless you’re diehard over Depp or Jolie, these are two good chances to save some money.
