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Mr Brooks (2007)

Director: Bruce A. Evans

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From Time Out Chicago

There’s an undeniable perversity in casting Costner as a man with a split personality—has Mr. Dances with Wolves ever manifested one personality, let alone two? Lifting the burden off his flavorless star, Evans (1992’s Kuffs) employs the Play It Again, Sam trick: Costner is Earl Brooks, packaging magnate and Portland, Oregon, man of the year, and Hurt—taking another bite of that History of Violence scenery—is the invisible sidekick who talks him into murdering random people. During one such escapade as the Thumbprint Killer, Brooks is caught on film by a photographer-perv who dubs himself Mr. Smith (Cook). Rather than call the police or extort money, Smith simply wants in on the next kill.

Toward that end, much of Mr. Brooks is concerned with cooking up elaborate snuff plans. The movie is among the most diseased Hollywood offerings in memory, but the lurid contortions of the plot certainly forestall boredom. Fearful that those Costner and Cook fans wouldn’t be enough to reel ’em in, Evans compounds the screen-acting hell by casting Moore as a wealthy detective with daddy issues. (Hurt eats them all alive, and his character doesn’t even exist.) Winning no points in the Morality 101 department, the movie seems to suggest that serial killing is something that’s…probably not okay, but that it might be forgivable if a) the murderer acknowledges his compulsion (as Earl does, at AA meetings), and if b) acquaintances and family somehow benefit from the deaths.

Author: Ben Kenigsberg

Time Out Chicago Issue 118: May 31–June 6, 2007

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