New UK releases this week : ‘Mr Brooks’ [6/10]; ‘Resident Evil – Extinction’ [5/10]

Published on: October 10th, 2007

MR BROOKS : [6/10] : US 07 : Bruce A. EVANS : 120 mins (BBFC)
seen at Vue cinema, Leicester : 5th Oct : press show (Cinemadays event)
   Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a respectable and wealthy factory-owner, devoted husband and father – a pillar of his community. But though ostensibly normal, this avuncular businessman has long been in thrall to a dark addiction: a compulsion to kill. He's able to keep this side of himself in check for months, sometimes years at a time – via techniques including the projection of an amoral alter-ego, whom he calls Marshall (William Hurt), and with whom he regularly engages in jocular conversation. But occasionally his "hunger" must be satisfied…
   Brooks is clearly intended as the latest addition to the charmingly-psychopathic likes of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay's Dexter Morgan. Ripley's career spanned four novels and numerous movie-adaptations, of course; the two Dexter novels have both been made into 12-part TV series. And Mr Brooks - based on an original (and distractingly coincidence-ridden) screenplay by a veteran screenwriting duo - feels constrained by the two-hour format of a mainstream Hollywood movie.
   Though Costner's Brooks (a surprisingly smooth gear-change for a star previously known for white-bread, straight-arrow roles) is the picture's main focus, there's no shortage of vivid supporting characters – the cop (Demi Moore) on Brooks' trail turns out, most unusually, to be a fabulously-wealthy heiress – and director/co-writer Evans doesn't always navigate between the various plots and subplots with sufficient smoothness. He does, however, achieve and maintain a beguilingly quirky tone – part-comic, part-sinister – and the unorthodox central "double-act" of Costner and Hurt works like a dream. 11.10.07

RESIDENT EVIL – EXTINCTION : [5/10] : US (US/Fr/Ger/UK/Australia) 07 : Eric BARBIER : 94 mins (BBFC)
seen at Vue cinema, Leicester : 7th Oct : press show (Cinemadays event)
   Well, one out of three ain't too bad. As I predicted back in 2004, Alexander Witt – handed the reins on Resident Evil: Apocalypse after toiling as second-unit director on numerous blockbusters – hasn't directed another picture since, instead doing his old job on both Casino Royale and Pirates III. But not only has RE:3 not gone straight-to-video as I'd envisaged, star Milla Jovovich has – surprisingly – been lured back as Alice, indefatigably knife-wielding heroine of a near-future Earth ravaged by biohazard plague.
   The plot is flimsy, gory nonsense assembled from countless previous, superior movies: a hardy band of survivors flee across an inhospitably desertine, zombie-infested USA towards a supposed safe Alaskan haven. But it's just a slim pretext for Milla – and other ass-kicking babes, all of whom maintain immaculate make-up throughout – to strut her uber-athletic stuff.
   And if Extinction is a marginal cut above Apocalypse, that's almost entirely down to Witt being replaced in the director's chair by Aussie veteran Mulcahy – taking an understandably steady-eddie approach on his first mainstream-Hollywood gig since 1994's flop The Shadow. He does a competent enough job with Paul W S Anderson's by-the-numbers script, and the target-audience of adolescent boys will be more than satisfied. While there's predictably little to detain anyone else, the opening and closing scenes do display sufficient wit and invention to suggest that, in riskier hands (Kim Chapiron? George Romero?), any fourth instalment of this supposed 'trilogy' perhaps doesn't have to be quite so grindingly meat-and-potatoes. 11.10.07

Neil Young

NB 
1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise
2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min)
3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature)