Thrills & Chills

Thrills & Chills
by Ed Owens

The thriller is one of the more difficult genres to do well. Revealing too little can leave your audience confused and bewildered, while revealing too much can leave them bored. Unlike comedy (which has difficulties of its own to deal with), the thriller has to achieve a very delicate balance early on, and then maintain that balance throughout if the audience is going to stick with you through to the closing credits. Two recent example of the difficulties involved are the Angelina Jolie thriller Taking Lives and the Johnny Depp vehicle Secret Window.

For the first hour, Taking Lives actually walks the line fairly well. The film establishes a dark atmosphere early on, thanks in part to a desaturated opening sequence depicting the killer's first victim and a credit sequence inspired (ripped off?) by David Fincher's Se7en . A serial killer with a particularly nasty modus operandi is murdering his way through Montreal , assuming the identity of his victims as he goes. When the police hit a dead end, they call on Special Agent Illeana (Angelina Jolie) of the FBI to help out.

Given that I had such low expectations, the biggest shock was how deftly the material was handled. The story is pretty much by

the numbers, yet still manages to be somewhat compelling. Illeana's investigation manages to open enough threads to keep us guessing (though, in all honesty, anyone familiar with the rules which govern such things will know the killer's identity fifteen minutes in), while D.J. Caruso's careful direction (previously on display in the underrated The Salton Sea) manages to propel the movie forward. There are even a few moments of genuine shock, even for a viewer as jaded as myself.

Somewhere around the hour mark, something happened. The movie changes so abruptly, so thoroughly, and so drastically that one can only assume it is the work of a different cast and crew. More intriguing than the film itself were the various scenarios I began spinning trying to explain the fact that I was now watching a completely different movie (one of my favorites involved the line, “We have to find someone who can not only finish this film,

but who didn't have the fish for dinner.”). Loose threads are left dangling as if they were never brought up in the first place, the direction becomes heavy-handed and begins to cheat (a close-up of a major character's nervous fidgeting serves no purpose other than to blatantly mislead the audience), and a subplot that had only been ever so briefly alluded to earlier suddenly takes center stage, becoming the linchpin that is supposed to hold the whole thing together.

The resulting climax is a train wreck of epic proportions, one that strains credulity past the breaking point and then some. Taking Lives begins promisingly, and, just as its shaping up to be a solid genre entry, ends disastrously. Clearly walking the line is far more difficult than even I had anticipated.

Secret Window also starts promisingly, though it takes far less time to lose its way. It begins with a moment of Coitus Interruptus as author Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) bursts in on his wife Amy (Maria Bello) and her lover Ted (Timothy Hutton). Flash forward several months to a cabin by the lake where Mort is recovering from his failed marriage and trying to write a new novel. Enter John Shooter (John Turturro), a menacing hick slow of gesture and slower of speech, who accuses Mort of plagarism.

One problem is that what works on the page becomes hideously tortured on the screen (director David Koepp's screenplay is based on the similarly titled

Stephen King novella contained in Four Past Midnight, the same collection that gave us the lackluster made-for-TV adaptation of The Langoliers). What the film lacks is not characters, but character, a consistent tone or atmosphere to give us something to hold on to. It vacillates between quirky comedy (which, I'm sure, involve stories of the sort of improvisation for which Depp has become known) and straight-up thriller, steering safely clear of the horror territory the trailers so badly want us to believe it is.

But wait...it gets worse.

The climax is a predictable mish-mash of silliness that is just as overly manic as the first hour is sedate. The film cheats

repeatedly to achieve the desired surprise and might as well be posting neon signs for all the attention it calls to "important" details. I've seen several reviews that mention Depp, specifically the funny tics and eccentricities, but I found them more obnoxious than anything else, too self-consciously showy. Any potential Secret Window had as a slow-burn thriller is defused, and the film never pushes the humor far enough to work as a horror-comedy.

Shooter's mantra throughout is that the story needs a better ending, something the filmmakers should have taken to heart. Unfortunately, they seem content to rely on clichés and contrivance to get to a destination even they themselves seem unsure of. Secret Window can't decide if it wants to be a straight-up thriller or a half-baked parody, and, ultimately, succeeds at being neither.