Vickery, John Movie Reviews

Brandon Lee’s penultimate picture isn’t much on paper--a dour college kid, bitter over his activist father’s death in Tiananmen Square, is targeted by a Chicago mobster after witnessing a gangland killing and reluctantly joins forces with brooding, obsessed cop Powers Boothe--but then who was watching this for the story? Consider this his screen test for the superior The Crow. Lee bites off bad dialogue with surly sneers, swaggers through scenes with the confidence of a movie veteran, and moves... well, his moves are the real reason to see the film. Nick Mancuso has a good time as the weasely mobster getting sloppy in his desperation, and Powers plays the father figure with less conviction than sheer tenacity, but Brandon Lee is the star-in-the-making of this production. This, unfortunately, is no star vehicle, but it provides enough bone-crunching, butt-kicking martial arts action for any action junkie. --Sean Axmaker

Strictly for horror buffs with an appetite for gratuitous gore and bloodshed, Dr. Giggles is appropriately titled, since the title character (played by Larry Drake, best known as Benny from TV's L.A. Law) is a psychotic killer who chuckles uncontrollably as he eviscerates his victims. Having escaped from a mental hospital, he returns to the town where he was raised to seek bloody revenge on those responsible for the death of his mad doctor father. His chosen payback method is a lot of unnecessary surgery. But then he takes pity on a teenaged girl who desperately needs a heart transplant. Of course, he's got plenty of involuntary donors! That should tell you enough to know if you'd actually want to watch this movie, which is actually worth a few laughs--or at least a few giggles--if you're into this kind of thing. Drake puts everything he's got into his performance, and you have to admire his effort in the service of a lost cause. --Jeff Shannon

While reinventing Leopold and Loeb for a new and troubled millennium, Murder by Numbers probes the disturbing psychology of two teenaged murderers and the cleverness of their crime. Like Hitchcock's Rope and other films inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s, the film intensifies as it explores the repressed (and subtly homosexual) tensions between high-school outcasts Richard (Ryan Gosling) and Justin (Michael Pitt), who randomly kill a woman to enact an amoral philosophy--and to tease a savvy homicide detective (Sandra Bullock) with misleading clues. While clashing with the by-the-book procedure of her partner (Ben Chaplin), Bullock gives one of her best performances in a role that comes with its own set of psychological hurdles. It's comfortable territory for Reversal of Fortune director Barbet Schroeder, who draws fine work from his cast while proving that there's no such thing as a perfect crime. --Jeff Shannon

While reinventing Leopold and Loeb for a new and troubled millennium, Murder by Numbers probes the disturbing psychology of two teenaged murderers and the cleverness of their crime. Like Hitchcock's Rope and other films inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s, the film intensifies as it explores the repressed (and subtly homosexual) tensions between high-school outcasts Richard (Ryan Gosling) and Justin (Michael Pitt), who randomly kill a woman to enact an amoral philosophy--and to tease a savvy homicide detective (Sandra Bullock) with misleading clues. While clashing with the by-the-book procedure of her partner (Ben Chaplin), Bullock gives one of her best performances in a role that comes with its own set of psychological hurdles. It's comfortable territory for Reversal of Fortune director Barbet Schroeder, who draws fine work from his cast while proving that there's no such thing as a perfect crime. --Jeff Shannon