Ticket Stubs #34: Slater-ed Releases

First on the list of Slater-ed Releases, FROM May 21, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #39: Is WWE Worth the Pursuit?), I turn to Pursued, a fairly recent look at the world of headhunting with Christian Slater. His voice retaining that quality of comic commentary he made famous in Kuffs, but retaining it in a suspense setting nonetheless, Slater plays a corporate recruiter who literally wants your head if you won't be bought. Thus, he always gets his man. A truly good man comes along and Slater finds his job a bit more difficult. As he must intrude on the man's life and privacy and threaten his family, Slater's headhunter gets the surveilance tables turned on him and winds up in a typical suspense-closing, life-ending gunfight/fistfight with his victim. Slater's character and actions have cookie-cutter psycho stalker written all over, and the ending takes a bit more examination and thought than a made-for-TV corporate suspense picture should require, but the concept was sort of original and the plot was appealing and followable. I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't rent it again, and I wouldn't recommend that you do, either. But it was OK. Take my rental fee and buy the Jabroni director a sandwich.
C

FROM June 3, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #40: Mental Assault, Commendable but Confusing) Next, we take a look at the world of cop movies with unnecessary characters and tacked on confusion in Mindhunters, starring Christian Slater, LL Cool J, Val Kilmer, and Cold Case's Kathryn Morris.
A group of FBI profilers and associated bureaucratic hangers-on are trapped on an island with a real serial killer while attempting to find a fake serial killer as a training exercise. As usual, everyone thinks everyone else is the killer until a well-placed murdering of the current suspect gets the remaining profilers looking for answers, splitting up, sticking together, and doing whatever other stupid thing will get them killed at the moment.
The killer's deathtraps are quite ingenious, although the Jigsaw killer's style is much more frightening than this movie's Puppeteer. The broken watch calling card is a nice touch as well, alerting the group as to when the next murder will take place but not who the next victim(s) will be. The Puppeteer is overall one of the coolest serial killer characters to grace the big screen, and props to the writers for thinking up all of Puppeteer's twisted character elements.
The fight scenes are equally noteworthy, as two suspected Puppeteers make creative use of their surroundings and self-defense skills, and the heroine engages the real killer in an underwater gun battle that looks like an impotent version of bullet-time fighting in The Matrix.
My only qualms about Mindhunters are as follows: while the Puppeteer's deathtraps are intricate, they seem so intricate at times that we viewers might think it appropriate to say that the scriptwriters and set designers are the villains rather than pointing our shifting fingers at the characters; also, LL's FBI Investigator--as he was the last to arrive on the island and his place in the scheme of things made no sense whatsoever--felt unnecessarily tacked on. Perhaps the Ladies' Love needed a little something tacked on to keep his wallet afloat. If you've seen this movie already or you're going to see it, and you catch something that explains what his character is good for, please let me know.
C+

If the Lyric Fits: "Ball of Confusion;/ that's what the world is today."
-Love & Rockets, "Ball of Confusion"

And finally, we move ahead a day to June 4, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #41: National Torture and Other Unmentionables) for Alone In the Dark, a cheap video game adaptation, wherein Christian Slater attempts to save the earth from symbiotic hell-spawn. A lot of fighting, a lot of monsters you can't really see, a lot of guns, a lot of blandness and monotony. The title is scary, but the movie is not.
F

Stay tuned for a bad case of sequel-itis as Just the Ticket returns, and remember to never go out in the dark alone.