Review of Mr. Brooks (2007) by Markb. — 17 Jun 2007

Some movies work well while you're in the theater...but two weeks later, you kick yourself for enjoying them (if you remember very much about them two weeks later, that is). With others, buyers' remorse sets in the morning after; with Mr.

Brooks, I started second-guessing myself about five minutes after the closing credits! Kevin Costner plays Earl Brooks, a successful businessman, solid citizen and pillar of the community (he's even seen receiving a "Man of the Year" award in the opening scenes) who also happens to be a serial killer.

Nobody knows about his double life: not his cute-but-clueless wife (CSI's Marg Helgenberger, who's wasted here), and not the cop who's relentlessly been tracking his killings for years without knowing who did them (Demi Moore, who very effectively rechannels the trademark steely screen persona she's honed in A Few Good Men and G.

I. Jane...in fact, virtually every movie she's made except Ghost, which writers Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans brazenly make an in-joke reference to). All of this, though, is about to change, thanks to a sleazy blackmailer who's even sicker than Earl is (matter-of-taste comic Dane Cook, in a role that should delight his fans and haters alike, but for completely different reasons).

Gideon and director Evans's most blatantly theatrical flourish is to feature William Hurt as Marshall, a sort of poisonous Jiminy Cricket, who keeps egging Earl on and giving him practical tips; only Earl sees and hears Marshall, and nobody else is aware at all that Earl is continually talking to "himself".

This risky technique is very well handled, and I equally admired the way that Mr. Brooks' makers keep stirring extra elements into the mix, including but not limited to parallel killers, wannabe killers, almost murderously acrimonious marriages and apples that don't fall too far from trees; Gideon and Evans are expert jugglers who don't drop any balls.

At first glance, their relative restraint in depicting Earl's handiwork--the movie doesn't get really gory until near the end--is seemingly admirable in this, the Age of Eli Roth...but this is where things start to unravel.

Nearly all of Earl's victims are truly despicable human beings, and the one exception is someone we don't see or learn about at all because Earl, who kills him or her in a track-covering move, does so completely off-screen.

This has the effect of minimizing Earl's crime in much the same way that 1959's true-life courtroom drama Complusion despicably argued against the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb for kidnapping and killing a ten-year-old boy by never showing the child, therefore implying that the victim really doesn't matter all that much.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this movie making its antihero charming or likable--that's the whole point in casting Costner in this radical change-of-pace role!--but keep in mind that the three sequels to Hitchcock's Psycho that were produced in the 1980s and 90s were predicated on the audience caring so much about the even more endearing Norman Bates that they wanted him to NOT kill again.

..not to keep doing it scot-free. To use Mr. Brooks' own analogy of depicting him as an "addict" (he even goes to AA meetings without revealing the specific nature of his addiction) , how would this movie be received if Earl were actually an alcoholic and the story asked us to root for him to continue driving drunk, plowing into carloads full of families, getting away with it and continuing to slug down his booze? Amorality in movies can often be fairly harmless (as in most heist movies), but at the risk of sounding like somebody who longs for the good old days of the Hays Code (which I most certainly am NOT!), immorality is a different matter altogether, and there's something truly insidious about a big-budget, mainstream all-star movie that manipulates its audience into rooting for a sociopathic mass murderer to keep up the good work.

I'll grit my teeth and reluctantly give Mr. Brooks a green light because it did so very skillfully and successfully while it was unfolding onscreen, but to stop there is like praising the construction of the Auschwitz gas chambers from an architectural or mechanical point of view while completely ignoring what it is that they were designed to do.