I didn’t expect much from this movie. I thought it was going to be predictable and just too damn safe for my taste. However, I was totally wrong. Mr. Brooks is not just a good movie, it’s a great one. A psychological thriller featuring an engaging story and an even better cast. It’s highly underrated and offers a different experience than other similar movies. We will be following the eponymous Mr. Brooks, a successful businessman with a horrific secret. A secret that’s constantly manifesting as his devilish alter-ego. The conversations between the two of them were quite thought-provoking.
Mostly because they felt real and resembled our own inner dialogue. The only small difference is that the things we think about are not nearly as depraved, sadistic, and just plain evil as the ones Mr. Brooks is thinking about. So, you can also say that Mr. Brooks is an excellent character study. It paints a picture of a man who’s at the same time incredibly simple but also quite complex. I always considered Kevin Costner a good actor but the roles he kept choosing were quite limited. They never gave him the opportunity to truly become someone else as I feel he always played the same guy.
At this point, I think it’s not a spoiler to tell you that Mr. Brooks is a serial killer movie. It follows the usual template of a dedicated detective trying to catch a vicious killer. We will get all the usual stuff when it comes to the police investigation side of the story. But when it comes to the killer’s side, things were a bit different. I don’t want to reveal too much now, so I’ll just leave that up to you to discover.
Meet Earl Brooks, a successful businessman living the perfect life in Oregon. He has a beautiful family and everything seems to be going great in his life. However, a surprise visit from his daughter Jane, will start a chain of events that will force Mr. Brooks to do all in his power to remain alive…
Mr. Brooks is a movie full of twists and turns. And the atmosphere is surprisingly vibrant for this sort of subject. Also, there are several graphic scenes of violence you simply would not expect in Kevin Costner’s movie. Apart from him, I must mention Demi Moore playing the tough detective trying to catch the killer, and the magnificent William Hurt playing Brooks’s alter ego. There are so many of these serial killer movies that the genre has become quite stale. In this situation, Mr. Brooks is a breath of fresh air offering a different kind of story. And as such, it deserves your attention.
It’s also interesting to draw parallels between American Psycho and Mr. Brooks. Both of these movies are character studies of serial killers who cannot control their evil sides but executed in very different ways.
Director: Bruce A. Evans
Writers: Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon
Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt, Marg Helgenberger
Fun Facts: There are plans to make not just a sequel to Mr. Brooks but also a third movie.
Rating:
IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780571/
