People, by their very nature, seem incapable of being satisfied with what they have. One Super Bowl victory is never enough and a certain potato chip company in the past used to advertise that you couldn't eat just one of their product.
Movies are the same, thus the presence of sequels, but I'm also referring to both genre and character motivation. Take serial killer flicks, for instance. Not only do those films keep getting made despite having already run through just about every possible permutation, but those pesky antagonists are never happy with just one homicide - they have to have more and more.
That holds true in the latest entry, "Suspect Zero." Although the genre has been pretty much tapped out, director E. Elias Merhige ("Shadow of the Vampire") - who works from a script by Zak Penn ("Behind Enemy Lines," "Last Action Hero") and Billy Ray ("Shattered Glass," "Hart's War") - has a halfway decent if familiar premise.
In it, an FBI agent tries to solve a multiple killing spree where a clairvoyant man, who claims to be a former agent himself, seems to be helping the investigator and/or possibly committing the crimes. And with Oscar winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley playing the possible villain, there's some obvious potential at play. Unfortunately, the resultant film is a cinematic piece of flotsam that isn't particularly interesting, engaging or well-made.
In fact, this is one of those efforts that feels flat, boring and botched from the get-go. We're supposed to feel for the recently demoted FBI agent who suffers from headaches, troubling visions and an apparent tendency to get too violent with his suspects.
Yet, there's something bad about the way Merhige directs Eckhart that causes us not to care squat about him, the supposed peril involved, or even the current or potential victims. The lame script and contrived dialogue don't help matters, while the plot is filled with so many holes, ill-conceived elements and an overall inanity that it occasionally feels like a parody - albeit an unfunny one - of the real thing.
The worst offender, however, is Merhige's overall direction. The various clairvoyant moments are shot in a red-bathed, distorted fashion that's neither interesting nor scary/suspenseful. Other shots, including the opening, upside-down introductory one of Kingsley's character ends up being nothing but a superfluous directorial flourish.
As far as the performances are concerned, Kingsley ("Thunderbirds," "House of Sand and Fog") is obviously the 800 pound thespian gorilla here, but he isn't given much of substance until very late in the game. And even then, his supposedly sympathetic performance falls short of the intended effect.
Eckhart, who I've thought was quite good in films such as "Erin Brockovich" and "In the Company of Men" is about as uninteresting a troubled protagonist as I've seen in a long time. And Carrie-Anne Moss ("Memento," the "Matrix" films) is completely wasted as the female sidekick-cum-former lover in a role that amounts to nothing.
The same can be said about the overall film. Whereas it could and potentially should have been interesting, it's consistently flat, boring and often poorly made. "Suspect Zero" doesn't quite earn a grade that equals its title, but it only manages to score a rating of 3 out of 10.
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