SnoopyStyle
Jessica Shepard (Ashley Judd) is an up and coming San Francisco police inspector after catching a killer. Her mentor John Mills (Samuel L. Jackson) is the commissioner who is also her father's former police partner. She has a dark sexual side and her psychiatrist Dr. Melvin Frank (David Strathairn) wants to dig into her father's series of killings including her mother and himself. Her ex-partner and lover Jimmy Schmidt (Mark Pellegrino) is possessive of her. She get promoted into Homicide with new partner Mike Delmarco (Andy García). She faces a hostile group of detectives. Then she starts blacking out and losing time. Her sexual flings starts getting murdered by a serial killer.It starts as an OK creepy noirish dark vibe. It pushes too hard sometimes but it's not bad. First off, she shouldn't be passing out like she's been drugged. It takes away the possibility that she is actually the one doing the killing. There is a paranoia with that possibility that is completely missing. The audience assumes that she's not the killer. The movie would be better without that assumption. Then the twisty thriller lacks the execution. It's all dark. The mystery isn't there. None of the characters are compelling. It's a thriller without thrills.
robert-temple-1
This is a superb, and, yes, twisted, thriller. It features a remarkable central performance by Ashley Judd as a young female police inspector in San Francisco. (The film was shot entirely on location there, which makes for a very good effect indeed, as what urban location in America is more picturesque than the Bay Area? We also gets lots of amusing shots of the seals basking and squawking, and we even see one of them inspecting a dead body in the Bay.) Ashley Judd has deep psychological problems in this film, as her parents mysteriously died when she was six, and she is haunted by it. When she returns home in the evenings, she appears to drink far too much and keeps passing out. In these scenes she is eerily convincing. She certainly knows how to let her eyes go out of focus in a closeup. She must have practiced in front of a mirror for weeks. She has the perfect mixture of cute little daughter with a girlish smile and tough police woman with a gun on her hip. She provides us with a real character study-and-a-half. Her partner in homicide is played by Andy Garcia with a rather soft and womanish manner, which contrasts equally perfectly with Judd's assumption of masculine manners as she swaggers about being tough, but then lapses into tears and he comforts her like a girlfriend would do. Constantly in the background is the Commissioner, played excellently by Samuel J. Jackson, who had been her father's partner in the police force and has raised her as an orphan since her parents died. Judd keeps a box of mementos with a teddy bear (which she kisses) and mixed in with her childish remnants are grisly police file photos of her murdered father, which she studies obsessively night after night looking for a clue as to what really happened, for the official story is that he killed his wife and then committed suicide. But she never really accepts this, and as the story progresses, we can see why. Judd is so screwed up psychologically that she goes around picking up strangers in bars and having one night stands with them, but then one by one they start getting murdered. She ends up investigating their deaths with herself as a suspect in their killings! She begins to get doubts about herself and think that maybe she is killing these men but not realizing it. So this film turns very much into a psychological drama, which intensifies the suspense. Is she after all a dual personality case? Is she passing out and then going and killing people during her blackouts? Or is somebody else doing this? If so, is it to frame her, is it an act of obsession, and who knows who they all are anyway? After all, she only saw most of the men once. (They are by the way all equally horrible creeps who hang around in bars being losers, so it is hard to retain sympathy for the Judd character in light of her bad taste and crazy behaviour patterns.) Naturally I cannot reveal the answer to this strange tale, but it certainly has a twist and a half. The cinematography by Peter Deming (who excelled himself in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, 2001, see my review, and LOST HIGHWAY, 1997) is excellent, especially the opening shots with the flying birds reflected in Ashley Judd's eyes as a man holds a knife to her throat. The direction by Philip Kaufman is superb as well. He was director of THE RIGHT STUFF (1983), the remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988). He is currently making a movie about Ernest Hemingway's romance with his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, with Nicole Kidman as Gelhorn. I have to say that everything started to go wrong for Hem when he left his first wife, but that was partly because she lost the manuscript of his first novel and he could never forgive her. He then fell into the clutches of two man-eaters, first the monstrous Pauline Pfeiffer, and then that Gelhorn person. After that, there was not much left of him, and he resembled the big fish caught by Spencer Tracy in THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1958), which by the time it was beached was only a skeleton, having been devoured by sharks en route. However, we are straying from TWISTED, which no one should really do, as it needs to be watched all the way through, because it is so ingenious.
GManfred
Did you see my headline? Right away this movie lost me. Ashley Judd doesn't look like she could break a pane of glass, but lately movie makers try, ever since G.I Jane, to make women in movies appear as mean S.O.B's. Can't tell you what a turn off that is, especially with women who don't look as though they could break the proverbial p.o.g.That said, this movie is essentially a murder mystery and on that level it succeeds. The killer is unknown until the last scene in the picture, and that's what a murder mystery is all about. Andy Garcia and Samuel L. Jackson are both good in support of Judd, who is so slight of build she could use some support lest she blow away. This picture was also a little heavy on psychiatric baloney and goes off on tangents at times, but, sticking to cases, it is a good mystery.Let's review; Good murder mystery, laughable macho female lead, annoying mental crap. The result is a rating of 6 - this picture is better than the IMDb low rating if you can fight your way through the underbrush.
nomoons11
Where to start. First off, Ashley Judd is definitely a beautiful lady but to cast her as a tough and always drunk cop who can't get enough sex is a laugh. The scenes she's in trying' to pull off bein' a cop are a joke. She's better off playin' the girlfriend/mother roles. Seeing her trying' to pull this role off was very painful. Andy Garcia was cast OK but man, I think I could see him a few times in this laughin' at the lines he had. You talk about corny lines. Straight outta the ole 30/40's crime movies and boy they don't fit in here. This thing needed a seriously talented screenwriter to pull this off and they didn't get one.Samuel Jackon. Now to me this one was the reason I titled my intro for this review...workin' for a paycheck. He was so bad and stupid in this it's transparent. No way in the world anyone in this film was doin' anything else but workin' for a paycheck. If they thought any of this bottom feeder was sharp and witty in the beginning, by the end, they were laughin' all the way to the bank.I can't actually believe I finished this one. I think I did so I could write this review lol. Save your netflix cue and skip this one.
