Director: Bruce A. Evans
Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt
Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have a vague memory of watching at some point in the last 18 years, and it has been sitting on my DVD shelf for several years, so I really had to have.
For the entire time I’m sitting there during this viewing and thinking that there would be—and indeed, I had even previously seen—a revelation that William Hurt’s Jiminy Cricket character looks like Costner’s father.
But that isn’t really there. What film was I watching way back when?
Did I Like It: It’s a nice—especially in a pre-Dexter world—premise, telling the story of a seemingly respectable man harboring a monster inside.
The problem with a nice premise is that it will only reliably fuel a trailer. I’m sure the trailer for Mr. Brooks is quite nice. Then again, I couldn’t be troubled to watch that trailer on the DVD, so… I don’t know.
Yes, I do, actually, know. If there is a hypothetical limit to the critical mass of subplots, then Demi Moore’s character in this approached it, if she didn’t shatter it. She’s after Kevin Costner (but doesn’t really know it). She’s tangling with Dane Cook, thinking he has some Kevin Costner energy. He doesn’t, but I’ll get to that here in a bit. She’s also got an ex-husband that’s causing problems. Then she also has another case that is haunting her. All of this, and she is not really the protagonist. That’s too much. So much, in fact that it’s inevitable that all of those elements will make up the parts of the third act, and do so pretty awkwardly.
It’s an awkward ungainly way to do a film.
And against all odds, I only get to the end of this review before I note that I have no idea why Dane Cook is in this film, and he never seems to quite know either. It’s not so great when he’s got to be the catalyst for all these plots.