Mr. Brooks (2007)

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a beloved family man, a respected businessman, and also a feared serial killer. He’s not been killing anyone for two years now, thanks to the wonders of the twelve step program (I wonder how that making amends part worked in his case). However, his second personality, one Marshall (William Hurt), representing director Bruce A. Evans’s fear of letting Kevin Costner simply act a man with two very different sides to his personality, does talk him into beginning another murder spree. Alas, some idiot, let’s call him Mr Smith (Dane Cook), has photographed Earl doing the deed through a window and is now blackmailing the serial killer into killing a random person with him, for Mr Smith desperately wants to know how that feels. And that would probably be the plot for an at least half sane movie, but since this thing’s about as deranged as its protagonist, there are various sub- and side plots awaiting your pleasure, apart from the Dexter-style dubious joy of seeing how Earl’s going to get away with it all.

So, we also spend quite a bit of time with the Detective hunting Earl, one Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore); we spend even more time with the divorce troubles her greedy husband – she’s not just a cop, she’s also a rich heiress, you see – gets her into. And then there’s the killer couple who is trying to take vengeance on her. And her breaking all the rules. Earl is going to involve himself in all of this business, because why the hell not?

Because that’s clearly still not enough PLOT for a single movie, meet Earl’s daughter Jane (Danielle Panabaker). Jane has left college for reasons she isn’t willing to explain, and now wants to work for Daddy. Turns out she is pregnant (and we learn that serial killer Earl is against abortion). Then it turns out she has probably murdered someone at school with a hatchet, and Earl has to worry that she has inherited some of his little mental problems, and try to fix her little problem without her noticing.

Also also, Earl might want to commit suicide in the most complicated manner ever devised, or perhaps not. Who knows?

I believe these are more or less all of the sub and side plots Mr. Brooks throws at its audience. If all of this sounds like total nonsense to you, you’ve got the film right. Obviously, it’s trying to milk the automatic respect a lot of people have for actors like Costner playing a bad guy for all it is worth, but it is permanently undercutting this by having so much plot business to take care of, Costner has little time to do any actual character work. That’s certainly not helped by the idiotic decision to give him another half portrayed by a different actor, which turns what should be an internal struggle into lots of expository dialogue, or scenes of the film gloating at how people not Costner can’t see William Hurt!


The funniest thing about the whole affair is that director/co-writer Evans presents all this bullshit with the grand gesture of somebody making a deep and thoughtful film about a terrible human being, wilfully pretending that this is not a cartoon, and that we learn a lot about the human condition here. Of course, if you watch the film as the cartoon about a bedraggled serial killer haunted by the horrors of plotting it actually is, it becomes rather brilliant, with stupid twists and idiotic new sub-plots coming so fast and furious, it’s impossible for me to watch this (or just think about it), and not fall into rather regular fits of the giggles. The film’s educational, too, in so far as we learn that there’s no genre that can’t be made hilarious by the simple application of all the plots ever.