Suspect Zero (2004)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Suspect Zero is an interesting piece, particularly to me. Although it's almost universally looked at as a failure, a shell of what it could have been, I'm crazy about it the way it is and think they did a fantastic job. It has a bit of a muddy past: Zak Penn wrote the script back in the 90's, after which it gained much interest from the likes of Tom Cruise, Ben Affleck and others. It took til 2004 to finally get the film made, with a version that many frown upon and frankly consider a shitty movie. Balls to them. It's a grim, eerie serial killer chiller with an atmosphere thick enough to slice with a razor, and one extremely unsettling lead performance from a haggard, haunted Ben Kingsley. He plays Benjamin O Ryan, an ex FBI agent. Or is he? He's efficiently hunting down and murdering random people (or are they?), leaving vicious visual calling cards and deliberately leaving victims lying on state lines to ensure the Bureau's involvement. In particular he takes a shine to raw boned Agent Mackleway (Aaron Eckhart), leaving specific clues for him. O Ryan employs a metaphysical method of finding his victims, using an old psychic technique from a scrapped program the feds once explored. This gives the filmmakers a reason to throw sketchy, disconcerting images, sounds and editing our way, providing a visually and aurally chafing experience. The film's director, E. Elias Merhige, is infamous for making the surreal, experimental shocker 'Begotten', and he brings the same stark, discomforting qualities to the proceedings here. I'm reminded of another experimental director who brought a near elemental aesthetic to an otherwise grounded serial killer flick: Tarsem Singh with his brilliant psychological fantasy 'The Cell'. Suspect Zero is the grimy, fragmentary cousin to The Cell's grandiose beauty. There's also traces of Sev7n, Silence Of The Lambs, Millennium and more, yet the film finds its own groove and never sinks into derivative gestures. Composer Clint Mansell ditches his trademark celestial tones for something truly unique, a dread soaked nightmarish lullaby that gives the film an otherworldly tone to linger in dreams. If you can forgive a few instances of murky plotting and one or two cheap plot turns, you'll hopefully enjoy this as much as me. It really deserves better attention and praise than its got so far.

They MUST run out of ideas sooner or later. It's entertaining to sit through this chimera just to see how many shameless rip-offs from other dark movies you can identify. Let's see. There's the slightly jagged male and female pair of FBI agents poking around in some madman's attic with a couple of miniature flashlights. That would be "The X Files." Many borrowings from "The Silence of the Lambs," including strange, sustained bass thrums and low-level creepy whooshing sounds on the sound track. "A Brilliant Mind" gives us whole walls plastered with bits of paper and photographs, making your skin crawl. There's the killer himself -- poor Ben Kingsley, a good actor -- baiting the FBI agents, as the serial killer baited the cops in "Se7en." If this movie weren't such a bricoleur's delight, I wouldn't wonder if the title, "Suspect Zero," hadn't been modeled on the far more effective "Citizen X." The killer himself, the eponymous suspect zero, is Ben Kingsley, endowed here with superhuman strength that allows him to smash his fist through a closed car window, grab a rapist, and pull him out through the smashed window before killing him. I really did feel sorry for Kingsley. He was excellent in Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden" and many other flicks.Aaron Eckhart is the male part of the investigating pair. He's okay, but he's so nearly a cartoon hero that he seems computer generated -- tall, handsome, firm jaw. Carrie-Anne-Moss has the more pragmatic, less tortured, distaff part. They were once a couple, but it didn't work out -- surprise! The dialog has no sparkle. The score is derivative. In a surprisingly convincing, though short, scene, an anthropologist (I guess) who once was Kingsley's professor describes him as "a black hole." Right. The whole movie.

E. Elias Merhige is the director of this fine movie, filmed in New Mexico and written by Zak Penn. The tale is that of F.B.I. Agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart), a superior investigator who soon tracks down and nabs a brutal serial killer. Unfortunately, his methods are such that the case against the suspect is thrown out, allowing the killer to escape justice. Mackelway is demoted and transferred to Albuquerque, where he is assigned to a a similar case involving yet, another serial killer and meets an old partner Fran Kulok (Carrie-Anne Moss). What Mackelway soon discovers is that all the clues of his prime suspect, Benjamin O'Ryan (Ben Kingsley) for these new grisly killings, may be the key to solving a series of other unsolved murders. The film is a dark drama centering on a collection of twists and turns involving a mysterious government agency called the Orion Project. Ben Kingsley gives an excellent performance and the cast excels in creating a superb movie worthy of being seen by all. Recommend for all Kingsley fans. ****

My first reaction as I began watching this film was that Ben Kingsley just didn't work for me in the role of a serial killer - even if his character is a serial killer with at least a hint of nobility about him - he does, after all, prey on serial killers; many of whom kill children. Still, while Kingsley is a great actor, to me he just doesn't fit as a serial killer of any kind - not even a noble one, which gave me an initial negative gut reaction as this began. Having said that, the movie could have overcome my reluctance to accept Kingsley in the role since his character wasn't the centrepiece of the movie. That was Aaron Eckhart's FBI Agent Tom Mackelway. Mackelway is a disgraced FBI agent who got in trouble with the Bureau for wrongdoing while working out of Dallas and ends up being "exiled" to to the FBI office in Albuquerque after a six-month suspension and psychiatric evaluation. Although not happy to be there, he does manage to put together the pieces of evidence that eventually lead him to Kingsley's O'Ryan.The background of the movie is that O'Ryan was some type of FBI special ops agent in the past who worked on a project involving "visioning" - allowing agents to get into the minds of others, especially apparently serial killers. Tormented by the visions he's seen, he's gone a bit off the deep end, and somehow Mackelway (who was never involved with the project) also has this visioning ability.The movie never really took off for me; it never really managed to draw me in. It's a bit of a mystery for a while as to why O'Ryan is obviously toying with Mackelway, but it wasn't all that riveting since I felt little connection with any of the characters and found the performances largely lacklustre, which matches my feeling about the movie as a whole. If you can stick with it, it leads up to a pretty good final confrontation between Mackelway and O'Ryan, but you do have to struggle to stay with it until those last few minutes, which are the most impressive few minutes of an otherwise largely unimpressive movie.