'Twisted' is anything but thrilling

By Steven Rea
Knight Ridder Newspapers

TWISTED Produced by Arnold Kopelson, Anne Kopelson, Barry Baeres and Linne Radmin, directed by Philip Kaufman, written by Sarah Thorp, photography by Peter Deming, music by Mark Isham, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour, 37 mins. Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, sex)

Then those guys start showing up dead.

Inspector Shepard's first case in her new job, it seems, is the hunt for a serial killer who's stalking her — and fatally pummeling the men she has been "intimate" with.

While that sounds like the stuff of a satisfying thriller — and prompts a few good lines such as "We just wasted the entire day tracking down me" — "Twisted" is anything but thrilling. It's a generic, high-end Hollywood whodunit with a school of red herrings swimming through a plot that has more holes than a gopher farm. The picture, directed in rote fashion by Philip Kaufman, looks good: pelicans bobbing aloft through Bay Area fog, a floater plucked from the tide in front of the city's brilliant new ballpark.

And Judd, with her hair cut short and her fists balled in plucky glee, carries the film as well as she can against mounting implausibilities.

By "Twisted's" final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face. Is the killer her new homicide partner (Andy Garcia)? Is it her professorial but shifty-eyed shrink (David Strathairn)? Or how about the jilted lover Jimmy (Mark Pellegrino)? It couldn't possibly be her sage mentor and surrogate dad, the city's police chief, played with wire-rim glasses and pat phrases ("A good inspector is never off-duty") by Samuel L. Jackson? Not him? No!

So while the body count rises, and her all-male coworkers sneer and jeer at Jess' deadly trail of promiscuity, Kaufman steers the cast through a succession of grim crime scenes, grimy bars, and off-balance shots of his lead actress drinking herself into a stupor. The drinking issue — a sign of Jess' troubled childhood, in which her father, a cop, apparently killed her mother and then himself — is a big problem in "Twisted." Not because Jess is a police officer who goes home every night and hits the bottle, but because she starts blacking out — and waking up the next day in a blur, not knowing what she's done, or where she's been. Maybe she is the killer, after all.

Without giving too much away, I do feel compelled, out of a sense of movie-critic duty, to cite the quaint old film noir phrase, "Someone slipped her a mickey." The logistical questions raised by said slippage are so puzzling and ill-conceived that they throw what little credibility "Twisted" had out into San Francisco's picture-postcard bay — where the seals and the gulls can pick at it like globs of junk.