Our Mr. Brooks
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Our Mr. Brooks Kevin Costner kills people with kindness. by John Podhqretz Hollywood loves serial killers so much that it has just released a movie with a selfless, thoughtful, well-meaning...
...That basement is packed to the rafters with all sorts of secret hidden panels and closets full of clothes and guns and money and fake IDs...
...Evidently, when they were building the house, his wife was not privy to the details of the basement's construction, or Mr...
...Brooks merges the serial-killer movie with another Hollywood chestnut: One of those mentoring stories in which the noble old veteran teaches a green rookie everything he knows...
...He is married to a beautiful woman (Marg Helgen-berger), has a beautiful daughter (Danielle Panabaker) at Stanford, and lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful basement art studio...
...And in the course of the movie (caution: spoilers ahead) he proves to be a very generous and self-sacrificing serial killer...
...But this is Kevin Costner, after all...
...Brooks arranges for her to find that guy in such a way that she can kill him off and spare herself from his evil...
...He beams with joy at the news that his daughter is pregnant, and begs her not to abort the child...
...Brooks lasts two hours, and through some of those two hours, you have to watch Demi Moore attempt to speak an English sentence...
...It's not only his daughter whom he rescues...
...Instead, Costner talks about wanting to quit, needing to quit, wanting to kill himself, needing to have the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, and so on...
...He has unlimited access to cash...
...What a guy...
...Brooks is almost entertaining...
...Brooks, however, is not that film...
...It's like listening to someone make a really dumb point, realize that he's making a really dumb point, and try to talk his way out of his really dumb point only to deepen the logical hole into which he is frantically digging himself ever deeper...
...Brooks is seen in flagrante killicto by a creepy guy (Dane Cook) who eagerly asks to be brought along on the next murder...
...He can move about undetected...
...He also takes an interest in the plight of a sultry police detective played by—I can hardly believe I am typing these words—Demi Moore...
...He even played it 19 years ago when he schooled Tim Robbins in the art of being a successful baseball player in Bull Durham, and he was only 32 then...
...But it lasts five minutes at most...
...That might be an acceptable punishment for serial killers, but what did the rest of us do to deserve such a stiff sentence...
...Costner played exactly this role in last year's The Guardian...
...Brooks himself, but rather by an alter-ego named Marshall, played by William Hurt...
...Of course, we know Marshall doesn't exist, but movies are a very literal medium...
...She is a poor little rich sultry police detective worth $60 million who is being blackmailed by her ex-husband and his trampy lawyer...
...It's almost as if I want to get caught," Mr...
...Brooks murdered his contractor to keep the secret...
...Brooks stars Kevin Costner as a successful Portland manufacturer who attends 12-step meetings because he so desperately wishes to stop killing...
...It is my belief that any movie in which a person murders his building contractor will gross in excess of $5 billion in its opening weekend because murdering your contractor is perhaps the fondest dream of every American who has ever done so much as install a new light switch...
...I assume Costner chose to produce and star in this film because he wanted to broaden his horizons by playing a psychopath...
...He's so rich he even owns a cemetery...
...which is to say, he possesses supernatural intelligence, godlike powers, and exquisite taste...
...It is, rather, a film in which the world's most careful serial killer fails to notice that the blinds are open when he murders a couple in the throes of sex...
...by John Podhqretz Hollywood loves serial killers so much that it has just released a movie with a selfless, thoughtful, well-meaning serial-killer as its hero...
...She is also being stalked by another serial killer, so Mr...
...The last time he tried to play a villain, as a redneck kidnapper in an endless Clint Eastwood thing called A Perfect World, his character somehow morphed into a loving father-figure to the young boy he had snatched...
...Suddenly Mr...
...Brooks's brain aren't given voice by Mr...
...Brooks muses in a rather transparent effort by screenwriters Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon to explain away one of the 342 plot inconsistencies in their magnum John Podhoretz, a New York Post columnist, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Brooks kill two people, but he's so wonderfully neat about it there isn't much to recoil from...
...That kind of faux pas has a perverse fascination all its own...
...Later, when he fears his daughter, too, has become a killer, he weeps at the evil that has passed to her through his genes—and travels to her college to kill somebody else and throw the cops off the scent...
...The really nasty ideas rolling around Mr...
...He can hack into computer systems...
...opus...
...We do see Mr...
...So Mr...
...Brooks is your standard-issue Hollywood serial killer...
...The fact that William Hurt is talking about how to kill people rather than Kevin Costner means that Costner is spared having to speak the despicable words himself...
...And that's what happens here, too...
...He is a master of disguise...
...There are echoes here of 1972's The Mechanic, one of the most peculiar movies ever made, in which Charles Bronson plays a cultured hit man with a hippie apprentice...
...Brooks kills the ex-husband and the trampy lawyer...
...And indeed, in most respects, Mr...
Vol. 12 • June 2007 • No. 38
