Via Roger Ebert's review of A Perfect World. Directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Swordfish (2001)) from a script by Stephen Levy and Tim Metcalfe. (The latter has form for this kind of murder-fixated exploitation.) A strong cast. Brad Pitt as a psychopathic "oakie" drags empty-headed and very talkative Juliette Lewis in his wake. They both seem to deliver what they were tasked with, but she's a lot better a year later in Natural Born Killers and he was more fun in True Romance. On the other hand, normies writer David Duchovny and photographer Michelle Forbes are bland, credulous and ineffective. She sports a haircut that reminded me of Elina Löwensohn's in every Hal Hartley I can remember seeing her in. Perhaps it was the haircut to get in the early 1990s.
Like so many movies before and since, this is essentially a road trip from somewhere east to California. Notionally the normies are scouting the locations of serial/mass/whatever murders for the sake of writing a coffee table book. The inevitable ensues with graphic but uninspired blood sprays. I did not understand what the point was; there was nothing new here. At times it reminded me of U Turn, others The Killer Inside Me (Pitt is generally inscrutable), and never The Silence of the Lambs.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin: "desperately stylish", "unfolding in a mode that might be called baby noir". Her take on Dominic Sena makes it sound like he was a forerunner of David Fincher; IMDB's biography for Fincher says they formed a company together.
