Release Date: February 27, 2004
Starring: Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Straithairn
Directed by: Philip Kaufman
Written by: Sarah Thorp
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (violence, language, sexuality)
Sometimes I wonder how audiences are fooled by run-of-the-mill murder mysteries like Twisted any more, considering that they make their way to theaters with such surprising regularity, until I realize that the average filmgoer probably doesn’t see as many movies as I do as often as I do. I don’t mean to slight the usual multiplex crowd, but rather to point out that a thriller like this lives up to its genre in such a limited way that anyone who has even a vague sense of what Hollywood is about will be severely underwhelmed.
The movie, which is directed by the usually competent Philip Kaufman, stars Ashley Judd as an alcoholic police detective, a role that seems culled from various stages of her long history of headstrong heroines who find themselves caught in the headlights of homicide. This is not a very impressive résumé. Judd is an actress whose early flirtations with playing the ingénue, as in 1997’s Kiss the Girls, never stuck, and anyway those days are well past her now. Since then, and especially in Twisted, she has consistently and steadfastly refused to rise above the formulaic.
Her character, Jessica Shepard, is even more unlikable in Twisted because she mostly deserves what she gets: she is a heavy drinker whose nights are filled with reckless sex with random men, all of whom begin turning up dead in a string of serial murders that Shepard is working (apparently somebody has to take these roles). At first it seems to be merely coincidental, but as the movie continues, her alibi gets shakier -- mostly because every time she comes home from a long day on the job, she hits the bottle, blacks out, and wakes up to a ringing cell phone to learn there’s a new dead body that needs investigating.
Shepard’s blackouts are a particularly weak element of both Kaufman’s direction and the Sarah Thorp screenplay because it allows the movie to invent whatever sort of arbitrary plot twist it needs to fill in the gaps. Yes, there is a long tradition of selective editing in developing suspense, but usually the gaps in time are dispensed with almost immediately. What Kaufman has done here is put together a jigsaw puzzle with a few key pieces missing until the last possible moment, expecting the audience to be impressed when everything falls neatly into place. Of course it all works out, I wanted to scream, because anything would’ve worked out.
It is true that Hollywood murder mysteries have an inherent degree of predictability, and usually the fun comes in watching our favorite stars bend the formula to their personal styles. But Twisted’s well-known and reliable cast, which includes Andy Garcia as Shepard’s partner, a detective named Delmarco, and Samuel L. Jackson as John Mills, the police commissioner and Shepard’s mentor (he was once a partner to her dead father), comes up as empty -- and if there was a mystery in this movie worth investigating, it’s where all their talent has gone. The famously prolific Jackson, in particular, would do himself no great harm in imposing a little self-restraint; his job with John Mills in Twisted makes it look as though his idea of acting is throwing darts blindfolded -- sooner or later, some will hit the target.
What he neglects is that far more will miss, or even injure the bystanders, like patrons who are forced to cough up cash to see this movie. It is such an unworthy thriller -- I’m not even sure why it’s called Twisted, except possibly as a reference to the studio exec who thought that audiences might be excited to see it -- that it seems a small disrespect to other films of the genre to label it as such. There are countless subplotlets that go nowhere and have no bearing on the movie’s outcome, sitting unresolved by the film’s end (though many a viewer will hardly bother to remember them), the most obvious of which is Shepard’s mysterious next-door neighbor, an elderly Asian woman who watches Shepard as she gets drunk each night but has no use in the plot proper.
The plot itself is the old whodunit exercise, where everyone, as they say, is a suspect. The script gives each supporting character -- all of them men -- reason to want to kill Shepard’s ex-flames, even if, in the case of at least one suspect, that reason is simply because he’s slept with Shepard himself. But none of this has any bearing on the movie’s resolution, because the means by which the killer can be identified -- a blood test -- is only introduced in the last 15 minutes. If only the minds behind Twisted had come up with that sooner. It could’ve saved Hollywood several million dollars and audiences 90 minutes of their time.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)