eye see you: one more sorry dance between a cop and a serial killer

(2002. dir: Jim Gillespie) I've had it up to here with serial killers. Seriously, I'm so done with the whole genre that I haven't watched more than a single ep of "Hannibal", this although I feel a passion for Mads Mikkelsen akin to the heat of a thousand suns.

This particular bad hombre is a cop-killer. He drills into eyeballs and hangs his victims, sometimes in humiliating ways, sometimes just deadly. He drives FBI agent Jake Malloy (Sly Stallone) into breakdown and a suicide attempt, after which Malloy is conveniently transported to a concrete prison facility in Wyoming in the dead of winter with a roomful of other disturbed cops for some detox and rehabilitation. The facility is entirely cut off from the rest of society, at least in the dead of winter.

Don't get me wrong. This movie has a great cast. Polly Walker is the resident medic, Stephen Lang has cultivated a truly creepy look to pull off the red-herring role, Charles Dutton is the steadfast buddy, Robert Prosky gets a decent turn around the dance-floor, and Sean Patrick Flanery has a nice moment as a broken young cop. Jeffrey Wright is, as always, amazing. In an era of movie stars winning Oscars for not doing very much at all (I'm looking at you, aging Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Christoph Waltz on your second trip to the podium), Jeffrey Wright transforms himself for every role. Could this damaged punk be the same cat who turned himself into Muddy Waters in front of my eyes in Cadillac Records, and pulled off the only truly effective moment in W., when an increasingly anxious Colin Powell asks a War Room full of asswipes and clowns what the Iraq exit strategy will be and is met with creepy silence and knowing smiles?

So I'm not saying don't watch it. It's an Old Dark House film: you've got a group of humans, most of them pretty messed up, locked away from the world in a place with no escape and a killer in their midst. The cast is full enough of stars and good character actors that the killer could be anyone. The trouble with using a snowstorm as your barrier is that climactic (or, in this case, semi-climactic) scenes shot in blizzards are unsatisfying. It's hard to tell what's going on, everyone looks like the same person in a shapeless, furry parka, and nobody can move very fast or effectively.

And Robert Patrick is great! He gets to play the hardened tough guy (the tough guy! in a Stallone film!), but then we get to watch him melt around the edges until by the end he's weeping like a child, and Patrick is the rare actor who can pull that transition off beautifully.

I give it two stars. The stars are for the acting. The story is pretty hackneyed, and, I swear to God, somebody needs to think of something to write about other than a damn serial killer playing cat-and-mouse with his investigating detective, or I'm going to lose it and start breaking some screenwriter kneecaps. Y'all stand warned.