Brooks Bothers

Lame psych thriller another low point for Mr. Costner

 Mr. Brooks -- in which Kevin Costner plays a respectable Seattle businessman who kills for thrills, thanks to the goading of an imaginary friend who looks a lot like William Hurt -- is stunningly tepid, neither the clever and poignant metaphor for addiction it strives to be nor the darkly comic Harvey it could have been. Indeed Costner's Earl Brooks is such a square (appropriate, perhaps, for a man who made his fortune in box manufacturing) that he kills all of two people in the movie's first 90 minutes. And he feels so bad about it, too -- what's fun about that? Mr. Brooks spends most of the film arguing with his phantom pal -- it's less a serial-killer movie than a buddy picture -- and trying to talk himself out of committing murder, which seems an awfully futile way to sell Costner's grisly comeback as the bad guy he has avoided playing for most of his up-and-down career. He killed more people as dreary do-gooder Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, for God's sake.

If only Mr. Brooks didn't take itself so seriously, and if only director Bruce Evans and writer Raynold Gideon -- both men known, if you can call it that, for having written Jungle 2 Jungle and Cutthroat Island -- weren't trying so hard to make some point about the hereditary nature of addiction. Because that's all this is: a morality tale in which a father (Costner) passes along to his daughter (Danielle Panabaker) his killer genes and then tries to reverse the cycle of addiction, lest his little girl wind up as tortured as he claims to be. (But Mr. Brooks is only half Costner's film; the rest belongs to Demi Moore, trying to reignite a career as something other than Ashton Kutcher's babysitter.)

So relentlessly dull is Mr. Brooks you're likely to let your mind wander as it drifts from plot line to plot line, wasting most of its two-hour running time introducing unnecessary characters till its mad-dash finale. To pass the time, you might sit there, as I did, and think to yourself that it's nice Hurt and Costner finally get to be in a movie together, after Costner's scenes were excised from The Big Chill. And then you might wonder why Kevin Costner doesn't allow himself to be funny very often, noting that he's a rather clammy dramatic actor who seems to absorb all life around him when he's got his Serious Face on. And then you might snap out of it for a second or two -- say, the one time Mr. Brooks laughs, or during a gunfight in the dark that looks more like an acid-washed rave than a duel to the death -- only to slip back into your multiplex reverie. And then you might wonder of the guy who plays Brooks's wannabe prot'g': Why the fuck is Dane Cook famous?

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