June 6th, 2007

For talented, imaginative actors who aren't afraid of taking risks, there's no disgrace in an occasional honorable failure, but Kevin Costner is having entirely too many downright flops to suit me. He 's gifted, appealing, and anxious to try new ideas, so what in the name of Hollywood hokum is he doing in a daft, hopped-up piece of "Say huh?" like Mr. Brooks? If Mr. Costner was not the star (as well as producer) I'd say it comes pretty darn close to my definition of unreleasable.

Let's see if I got this straight. Attractively entering middle age and no longer a scruffy cowboy, wolf trapper, science-fiction Waterworld survivor or Robin Hood, Mr. Costner now plays a man with a double life. By day, he's a respectable, clean-cut, immaculately groomed Portland businessman, community leader, and model husband, father and Brooks Brothers customer named Earl Brooks. By night, he 's a heartless, savage, cold-blooded, poker-faced serial killer called The Thumbprint Killer, who slaughters people for no reason except that he thinks violent death is a cool addiction, like blackjack, Starbucks latte, and cell phones. Philanthropist, neighborhood hottie and Portland 's Man of the Year, Mr. Brooks has got everything, including what he calls an incurable "hunger in the brain" to be a homicidal maniac. To this end, he even has a make-believe smartass alter-ego named Marshall (William Hurt) who appears in rear-view mirrors to pick his victims and egg him on. Sometimes, when Mr. Brooks thinks about giving it all up, the enigmatic Marshall goes ballistic. I mean without all that blood and forensics-lab tissue he would be out of a job. So they plunge on, observing their victims with almost boyish curiosity, cocking their heads at odd angles to take in the penetration of the knives and bullets. Never careless, Mr. Brooks plans and executes his crimes with precision, rearranging the crime scenes to cover his traces, retrieving the slugs, and fitting patterns with such enviable ingenuity that he becomes the primary obsession of a cynical lady detective (Demi Moore) who follows his every move with more attention than she pays to her personal life. Now, suddenly, Mr. Brooks makes his first tactical error. Someone has photographed him standing in an open window at one of his murder scenes, and all hell is about to break loose.

Here's the exasperating, unforgivable rub. For the first hour, Mr. Brooks is a movie with real potential. The idea of a dedicated serial killer who can 't get his work done because his domestic life keeps interfering with his career is pretty damned fascinating stuff. But then the movie self-destructs in such a plethora of tangential characters, loopy plot twists and annoyingly mixed-up film genres that it goes from grim and gripping to silly and surreal. Mr. Costner works hard, but what in the hell is this movie about? The invisible alter-ego idea runs out of steam fast thanks to William Hurt 's overacting, and now Mr. Brooks is stalked by the equally irritating photographer who longs to be a serial killer himself. Instead of blackmail, he strong-arms Mr. Brooks into teaching him the ropes. Dane Cook, a comedian with the personality of a pit bull who is to acting what clabber is to cows, turns the movie into a screech match of nerves and noise. Meanwhile, in addition to the alter-ego, the meddlesome new prot ege, and a morgue full of gruesome corpses, two more serial killers called The Hangman Killers arrive to wipe out Demi Moore, hopelessly miscast as the cop who is so independently wealthy she doesn 't need the money, but who is much nastier than all of the real monsters put together. Suddenly, Mr. Brooks and his lovely wife (the great, underrated, and criminally wasted Marg Helgenberger) face a new nightmare: their teenage daughter drops out of college, pregnant, and a suspected campus serial killer herself. Does it run in the family? Is mayhem contagious? Didn 't anyone see The Bad Seed, the movie that was hooted off the screen for hinting that homicidal genes can be inherited, like freckles?

I am still a Kevin Costner fan, and he's a much smarter filmmaker than Mr. Brooks' mediocre director, Bruce Evans. In fact, this whole movie might have had a focus it does not have now if Mr. Costner had only given up the impossible task of trying to breathe life into a pointless character and directed it instead. Some excellent film noir cinematography and one-half of a script that holds interest and keeps you guessing is not bad. But by the end, there are so many serial killers running amok that I didn 't know if I was watching a horror film or a comedy. There are laughs--all accidental--but the audience around me was moaning in agony. And please don't tell me it was supposed to be played for laughs all along, because I don't buy it. Too late to save it from doom, the twists and snafus in Mr. Brooks start coming too fast for the audience to absorb, and the movie turns delusional. Quite a baffling experience, if you ask me.

Today's movies are often filled with paranoia, and sometimes they get too schizophrenic for coherence or comfort. But a movie that is about nothing but paranoid schizophrenia from start to finish is rare as an authentic autographed 8 x 10 of Jack the Ripper. A sick little number called Bug is just such a movie. Bring a barf bag.

Based on a creeped-out 2004 off-Broadway play by Tracy Letts, whose screenplay remains faithful to the freaky original, Bug is ugly, repellant, nauseating, and relentlessly lurid. (Specialties of the house, served often by director William Friedkin, but not with much box-office success.) I feel I should say something about the shock effects, but I truly don 't know where to begin. In a trailer court aptly called the Rustic Motel, on an Oklahoma highway in the middle of nowhere so filthy and primitive it makes the abattoir in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like the Hotel du Cap, a battered cocktail waitress (Ashley Judd) lies around snorting coke with a lesbian friend (Lynn Collins), listening to a ringing phone with nobody on the other end. Enter a cadaverous war veteran (Michael Shannon, repeating his original role) who convinces them there 's radioactive plutonium in the smoke alarm. The next morning Judd's ex-husband (Harry Connick, Jr., without a piano to save him) steps out of the shower after two years in prison and beats the living daylights out of her. The young stranger, who is now her lover, has a head full of phantom theories about the dangers of technology and germ warfare, and the bulk of the film centers on the insects, plant lice, and bug larvae he believes are growing under his skin as a result of macabre medical experiments conducted by the U.S. government. Convinced the bug eggs have moved from the bed sheets into her own skin, Ms. Judd fills the room with fly catchers hanging from the ceiling, insecticides, and bug sprays that spread unspeakable poisons to her lungs, glands, and bloodstream. Much self-mutilation results, but by the time they strip naked, ripping out their teeth searching for egg sacks inside their gums, Bug unleashes more horrors than a normal audience will tolerate. There is no content worth mentioning, but for style William Friedkin returns to the shadowy, decaying look of his worst film, the torturous homophobic disaster Cruising. Everything is so dark you wonder if anyone involved has ever heard of electricity. The claustrophobic murk is a combination of Kafka and life in an outhouse. But in the end, it makes no point at all. So obscure that it never irons out its wrinkles to a smooth template for nouveau horror, it 's an alternate vision that reacts against the mainstream of the slash and hack school of teen horror flicks, but its paranoia is so political that it becomes depoliticized in its exaggerated rant. A dismal excess of moral apathy that blames the Republicans for computer chips that control world religion, economics, and population growth --not to mention bad movies--it's clear from the get-go that Bug is headed for a date with a lighted match. Count on it. It's the only thing in the movie that makes sense. I read an interview in which Ashley Judd called this sick assault on the senses "an extreme love story". I want to be on what she's on.