I read a pretty interesting article about Twisted in the Sacramento Bee about how the film was shot entirely in San Francisco and some of the tricks that were used. One of the more interesting things that I read was that, during the scene where they found the first body in the river with the ball game in the background (which apparently was a real game that they included in the shot for effect), George Lucas showed up on the set, literally just long enough to say, `I never shoot at night, I never shoot in fog, and I never shoot water. I'll see you later.' Or maybe he just didn't have the heart to tell Phillip Kaufman that he doesn't involve himself with obviously bad movies. So George, what was all that Episode I nonsense??
I can understand what people didn't like about the film. Ashley Judd's character, around which the entire film centralizes, was heavily flawed, and I don't mean just that she is a person who spends about 60-80% of her life either drunk or blacked out, for reasons which come up later. Jessica Shephard (Judd), is a police officer who gets promoted to Homicide Detective after collaring a high-profile fugitive through what turned out to be dumb luck. Nothing TOO wrong so far, I'm sure it's not uncommon for dumb luck to be involved with solving complicated crimes, but the real problem with Judd's character is that we're asked to believe that she is a well-to-do big city detective, she's staggeringly beautiful, and yet has a heavy alcohol problem, and more importantly, a habit of going to trashy bars, meeting trashy men, and taking them home and having trashy sex with them.
These men then have a habit of later turning up dead, having been beaten badly and then burned with a cigarette on one hand (although not necessarily in that order), and needless to say, all the evidence points to Shephard, since she has been `intimate' with them, despite not knowing much about them beyond her carnal knowledge. So the first problem with the movie is about Judd's character, but an even more pressing concern comes from the set-up of the premise, which renders the movie unfortunately predictable. And I say unfortunately mainly because there is such a strong cast and crew involved.
(spoilers) From the very beginning, you know that Shephard is not the real killer because no murder mystery in the history of time has had the killer turn out to be the person that all evidence was pointing to all along (except for the awful 1974 horror film Scream of the Wolf). But an even more pressing concern involved in this plot, which expects the audience to wonder throughout the film whether Shephard really is the killer or not, is that it presents as a possibility that she regularly gets dizzy and passes out from drinking wine after a long day at work, and then, I guess, goes out and commits the brutal tortures and killings while in an alcohol-induced blackout. RIGHT.
So Shephard has to know that she's not doing the killing. She IS a detective, right? Would she not figure out that she's being drugged, or are we to believe that her alcohol problem is so extreme that she regularly drinks herself into oblivion, even after realizing that she doesn't know if she's killing people during her drunken slumbers? Personally, I don't believe that any police detective on earth would not be able to immediately figure out if he or she was being drugged regularly, so much of the movie's dramatic tension evaporates with the credibility of Shephard's confusion.
I really hate to write such a scathing review about this movie, because I am such a huge fan of so many of the people in it. Ashley Judd has been making some bad work decisions by starring in seemingly one cheesy thriller after another, but I still think she's an obviously competent actor. Unfortunately, the movie even manages to stagger and stumble all over the place despite the awesome power of actors like Samuel L. Jackson and (admittedly less awesome) Andy Garcia.
The obvious fact that Shephard is not the killer is at least partially obscured by much ado being made about her father having been a mass murderer, killing a mass of people including her mother and himself. Her boss, police commissioner John Mills (Jackson), raised her for the rest of her life and is now her boss, hence his reluctance to pull her off the case when the dead guys keep turning out to be her former one-night stands. He watched her grow up, and no god-daughter of HIS will show any weakness on the force! Besides, they have to maintain business as usual, especially since Shephard may turn out to be pretty good bait in catching the killer.
Director Phillip Kaufman proudly went to great lengths to be sure that much of the San Francisco setting made it onto the final cut, peppering the film with famous locales that can easily be found and visited. Many of them I've been to myself dozens of times, but unfortunately the hypnotic setting of San Francisco overshadows most of the rest of the film, including the big actors, mostly because the movie is so clunky and outlandish.
As a general rule, psychological thrillers seem to be plagued with plot and logic discrepancies (even the good ones, like In Dreams) that are usually glazed over with some sort of quirky trick, like Shephard being really hot and being an alcoholic and sleeping with random men just for the fun of it (maybe she can't find anyone to date her?). Twisted tries to do that as well, but stops trying to cover its goofy tracks by the third act, where the movie just seems to be trying to end itself. Indeed, it only took the cops about a minute to find that exact dock in the dark where the final climax takes place.
Twisted succumbs with desperate eagerness to the now-common attempt by movies to throw in some mind-bending twist in the final scene (notice, for example, the film's title), but instead of shocking us with a twist that we may have convinced ourselves by now that we didn't see coming, it throws in the most obvious, clichéd twist imaginable. I guess not many people may have seen something that bad coming, but forehead-slapping disappointment is not generally the reaction intended in an unexpected conclusion.
4 out of 5 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
