Suspect Zero

Suspect Zero (2004)

Runtime: 99 minutes

Directed by: E. Elias Merhige

Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Carrie-Anne Moss, Ben Kingsley, Harry Lennix, Kevin Chamberlain

From: Paramount

Wednesday night I saw Prometheus again, which I did not like back then... I don't like it now. It's more like ProMEHtheus. Last night, I saw this motion picture, which is pretty bad. It shouldn't have been, as I explain below:

Last night I decided to watch something different, so “dark thriller” is where I went. I remembered that Suspect Zero was a thing when it came out but it wasn't until a few years ago I heard how the original script from Zak Penn was highly regarded, but as it was Hollywood they F'ed it up when it came to the big screen. After having seen this, yes the rewrite on the script from someone else was no good and needlessly ruined what on paper sounded like something which could have been real good, even if “inspired” by Se7en.

This article explains how the two scripts are so different, but I'll summarize it: in the original, a brand new FBI agent named Mackelway is taunted by O'Ryan, a genius profiler who went mad with the theory that a Suspect Zero could exist, meaning a serial killer could exist that would do things to disguise the fact he's a serial killer, such as not having a pattern or working where other serial killers are, so O'Ryan tries to hunt down what he believes is a thing-but may be a figment of his imagination-while Mackelway tries to hunt down O'Ryan. It sounds greatly interesting and could have been a 90's thriller classic, something that could favorably be compared to Se7en. However, the script bounced around for years and it was rewritten into this movie, and what a downgrade it was.

Instead, the film is about Mackelway being transferred from Dallas to Albuquerque, New Mexico (actually, it was cheap to film there so that's what Paramount did) and while O'Ryan is still on the hunt for Suspect Zero, it's less of an epic feud or cat and mouse chase between the two characters and instead Mac lucks into a lot of things... oh, and O'Ryan has psychic powers and does “remote viewing”, which was developed by a government program. That's where you are locked up in a room and you can sketch out an image from anywhere in the world... but if you've seen The Men Who Stare at Goats, you already have had that phenomenon explained, and I make the assumption that movie was better than this was.

This movie is a mess. The remote viewing stuff does nothing to make this exciting and instead makes this an absolute slog to get through. There are talented actors present (Aaron Eckhart, Carrie-Anne Moss, Ben Kingsley) but they can't do much to elevate this bad material and incredibly muddled story. It's just not exciting or fun or entertaining to watch. What doesn't help is that-to steal a thought-this looks like a 90's television drama and it's shot in an incredibly dated way where as many tried to do in the late 90's or early 2000's, there are wacky camera angles and random camera filters. It does not look good in 2017.

To think that in the late 90's the original script was almost made into a movie... starring Sly Stallone. As that would have been around the time of Copland, that would have been nice for his career and he probably wouldn't have had to do stuff like... D-Tox, i.e. Eye See You, where he was able to play an FBI agent; I understand that isn't too good either. While it's crappy that Zak Penn had the exact same thing happen to him with the Last Action Hero script he co-wrote, at least he managed to have a Hollywood career and do things like be one of the writers for The Avengers and he will be the upcoming Spielberg movie Ready Player One; despite his scripts sometimes being treated poorly, I still won't shed any tears as he's done fine in Hollywood. Not that it isn't disappointing the original script for this was morphed into a movie that was pretty bad.