Suspect Zero - 2004

 Funny, I don't remember this movie coming out in 2004.  But maybe that's cause it was a colossal failure with limited release.

What does one really say about late-to-the-party gritty serial killer movie Suspect Zero?  Well, it had a cool cast.  Aaron Eckhart is a distraught police investigator, Carrie Anne Moss is his sidekick, Ben Kingsley is the serial killer.  Produced by Tom Cruise, what could go wrong?

E. Elias Merhige of Begotten and Shadow of the Vampire directs this extremely bland and overly stylized thriller.  Seriously speaking though, the amount of talent involved in this is phenomenal.  The writers are also just absolute Journeyman level caliber, tons of projects at their backs, and yet this movie just clunks along in a horrible way, and I could not tell ya who is to blame.

Ben Kingsley is seen killing a few people and Aaron Eckhart is investigating the murders.  The murders have the eyes cut open and a big circle with a slash cut into the bodies.  Aaron Eckhart connects this to a map that shows a ton of kills and an idea of a perfect serial killer, a killer without patterns and without any of the other fallbacks. 

Merhige has some weird experimental film techniques here and there, and there are certainly attempts at atmosphere, but it somehow just never quite works.  I dunno, its an interesting case study, but I would just say it's too little too late.  That and the acting is sometimes quite bad, there's obvious "why this why that" type stuff too.  One example is they stumble upon a serial killers graveyard, there are triangular patches of graves dug everywhere.  But...did he kill all these people at the same time?  WOuldn't some of them not be freshly dug?  Eroded? Grown over?  It's these type of things that riddle the movie with problems.

I think it got blamed on Merhige, who has not done a film since, and that's too bad, cause Begotten is cool.  I will give Suspect Zero two stars though, and that's very generous.