Superbad

**.5/****     SUPERBAD (R)

Seth Rogen is well-known for his supporting work in the television comedies Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, as well as his role in Judd Apatow’s 2005 comedy The 40-Year Old Virgin and this year’s Apatow helmed film Knocked Up. But Rogen is also an Emmy-nominated writer, having worked as a staff writer on Undeclared and Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical television series for HBO, Da Ali G Show. There, Rogen got the chance to work on the staff with his childhood friend Evan Goldberg. The duo would later go on to collaborate on the screenplay for Superbad, a 2007 comedy produced by Apatow.

Evan (Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill) are two socially-inept best friends just weeks away from their high school graduation, which will force the two friends to separate from each other in order to attend different colleges. Both desire to have girlfriends for the summer before they head off to school, with each eyeing a particular classmate as their potential love interest. Seth’s crush Jules (Emma Stone) invites them to a party at her house, with Seth agreeing to supply the party with alcohol.

Seth talks awkward teenager Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) into using his fake-ID at a nearby convenience store in order to illegally obtain the drinks for the party, but an incident at the store results in Fogell leaving with police officers Slater (Bill Hader) and Michaels (Rogen). Still not wanting to disappoint their prospective girlfriends, Evan and Seth begin a wild chase after their needed alcohol, but several disastrous mishaps along the way threaten to destroy their lifelong friendship.

A throwback-style teen sex comedy, Superbad packs with it more laughter than any of Apatow’s previous films, but lacks the overall emotional depth to the characters that made The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up standout comedies. Like George Lucas’s American Graffiti or Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, the entire movie takes place over the course of one day and one night, but Superbad doesn’t utilize its ensemble nearly as well as those films, and worries more about delivering constant one-liners than it does connecting all of the plot strands.

Directed by Greg Mottola (TV’s Arrested Development, TV’s The Comeback), it doesn’t take long for the movie to establish its comedic rhythm, easily becoming one of the funniest movies of the year. The strongest moments in the picture are found in the friendship and misadventures experienced by Evan and Seth, while the subplot involving Fogell and police officers Slater and Michaels serves primarily as a setback, filling too much time with sideshow antics that take the focus away from the more interesting story.

Cera (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, TV’s Arrested Development) and Hill (Evan Almighty, 10 Items or Less) create an exceptional on-screen chemistry with each other, and their inferior acting abilities are easily masked by the hilarious dialogue they are afforded. Their love interests played by Stone (TV’s Drive) and Martha MacIsaac (Ice Princess) are also worth mentioning, although they are so weakly developed that Evan and Seth’s obsession with two seems slightly disturbing and sexist.

A raunchy and coarse high school tale, Superbad gets by thanks to the consistent laughter it provides alongside of a sweet story about male friendship.

Underdog

 

*/****     UNDERDOG (PG)

In the 1960s, W. Watts Biggers, Tread Covington, Chet Stover and artist Joe Harris teamed together to create the television cartoon series Underdog as a new way of advertising breakfast cereal for their account General Mills. The character of Underdog was a superhero parody of Superman involving an average beagle who would sneak into a telephone booth and transform into a costumed crime fighter when trouble appeared. Several years later, Underdog receives an update and some slight character changes in the Walt Disney Pictures live action adaptation in 2007.

A mad scientist named Simon Barsinister (Peter Dinklage) has masterminded a mysterious lab experiment that has inadvertently provided an ordinary Beagle named Shoeshine (Jason Lee) with an unparalleled amount of superpowers. Shoeshine manages to escape from the laboratory and Barsinister, and is soon befriended and adopted by a local police officer named Dan Unger (James Belushi), who decides to bring Shoeshine home for his lonely 12-year old son Jack (Alex Neuberger).

The bond between Jack and Shoeshine becomes much greater once Jack realizes that Shoeshine can communicate with humans, and that he possesses incredible superpowers. Shoeshine develops a secret identity as Underdog, a crime-fighter who dons a superhero outfit and protects citizens and animals alike from unforeseen tragedies. But Barsinister and his henchman Cad (Patrick Warburton) soon concoct a plan to capture Underdog and use his extraordinary abilities to destroy the city.

A family-friendly live action flick that doesn’t quite add up to the cheap delightfulness experienced when viewing the original low-budget animated series, Underdog is an average kiddie film that flounders through foolish jokes on its way towards delivering a half-hearted positve message. For the most part the movie stays to true to the cartoon, but writers Joe Piscatella, Adam Rifkin (Zoom, Small Soldiers) and Craig Williams fail to play up the satire in the character, and instead recycle material from several family-oriented films.

The writers do a good job at keeping the story moving and the audience’s attention focused on Underdog, but too many characters and storylines are tossed about and left isolated in the end. Similar to this year’s earlier Firehouse Dog, Underdog jumbles several misshapen pieces together that fill time and send us from one slapstick scenario to another, but never clearly defines for us who these characters are, why they are involved in the situations they are and the reasons for their actions.

Most of the acting in the film is rather bland, with neither Belushi (The Wild, TV’s According to Jim), Dinklage (Find Me Guilty, TV’s Nip/Tuck) or Warburton (Happily N’Ever After, TV’s Kim Possible) electing to go over-the-top ala Tim Allen in The Shaggy Dog, but the three also play it too straight and safe for this action-comedy. And Lee’s (Clerks II, TV’s My Name is Earl) great voice-work from The Incredibles and Monster House is practically nonexistent here, burried beneath his affable delivery.

A listless summer movie, Underdog’s cute antics feel much better suited for a half-hour series on the Disney Channel than they do as a Walt Disney Pictures big-screen offering.

Vacancy

**/****     VACANCY (R)

Luke Wilson’s Hollywood career began with the lead role in 1996’s Bottle Rocket, which was co-written by Luke’s older brother Owen and director Wes Anderson. But while Owen Wilson became a household name through his apperances in major studio comedies like Meet the Parents, Wedding Crashers and You, Me and Dupree, Luke Wilson continues to bounce around different genres attempting to find his niche. Wilson takes on his first leading role in a scare flick in 2007, entitled Vacancy.

David (Wilson) and Amy Fox (Kate Beckinsale) are a struggling married couple following the accidental death of their son, whose car breaks down late one night on an isolated highway on their way towards visiting Amy’s family. The young couple decide to seek assistance with their vehicle in the morning, and elect to stay in a remote hotel they passed along the highway about a mile before their vehicle troubles began.

Unable to get the television in the motel room to work, David begins to watch video cassettes left on top of the VCR in the room by the motel’s owner Mason (Frank Whaley). But it turns out the snuff films left in the room are actually homemade tapes of a murderous rampage that occured in the very same room the Fox’s are staying in. Once they notice the same video cameras still located in their room, David and Amy attempt to find ways to outsmart their would-be killers while those killers continue to watch their every move.

A stylistic thriller that relies more on suspense and less on gore, Vacancy is far more intriguing and appealing than the common torture flicks of today’s movie making world, but the overall lack of storytelling serves only as a detriment to the picture. The characters of David and Amy are developed nicely in the beginning with some little details about their relationship hinted at, but also left ambiguous for futher character development later in the story. Unfortunately, the audience remains even more uncertain to the movie’s main characters at the end of the movie as they do at the start of the film.

The script, written by first-time screenwriter Mark Smith, also makes the character of Mason and those behind the impending terror to the Fox’s indistinct and obscure, never once offering a reason or a motive for why this madness is occuring. Smith’s insistence on using several genre cliches like the withdrawn couple driving the broken-down vehicle on a removed path that leads them towards a solitary hotel takes away any fresh and unique feel the picture could have had.

Director Nimrod Antal does a good job at establishing an overall creepy vibe from the start, and once the thrills begin, they are fast and exciting thanks to some tight editing and tight pacing. Wilson and Beckinsale (Click, Underworld: Evolution) also do a decent job of holding your interest, despite their lack of development. Neither of them turn in a standout performance, but they still manage to work well with the material they are given.

Like this year’s earlier film Disturbia, Vacancy steals heavily from a specific Alfred Hitchcock suspense picture, but the filmmakers behind this film only manage to deliver a movie slightly better than the other recent efforts made in this troubled genre.

The Salon

1/2-a-star/****     THE SALON (PG-13)

Tim Story’s 2002 comedy Barbershop starring Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson and Cedric the Entertainer became a surprising fall hit, grossing over $75 million. A sequel soon followed in 2004, entitled Barbershop 2: Back in Business. The movie performed below the standard set by its predecessor, but still managed to take in over $64 million. A similar tale, but not a spin-off, starring Queen Latifah and Alicia Silverstone called Beauty Shop grossed over $36 million in the spring of 2005. A true female spin-off now arrives in 2007, called The Salon.

Jenny (Vivica A. Fox) is a single and successful owner of a salon in a rough part of Baltimore, Maryland. Her beauty shop still remains a popular hangout in the community, and Jenny’s sassy talking employees and her colorful collection of customers freely let their hair down and show no shame when it comes to spreading the area’s hottest gossip. These moments, along with Jenny’s young son Trey (Dabir Snell), provide her with plenty of laughs, but also a few headaches.

But Jenny’s biggest problem comes from Michael (Darrin Dewitt Henson), an attractive attorney representing the City of Baltimore, which plans on using eminent domain and a large payoff as a means of tearing down the corner salon and replacing it with a much needed parking lot. But despite the opportunity to start over in a better part of town, Jenny decides to fight for the shop and the community that has meant so much to her.

Originally released at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, The Salon is a derivative flick that should have remained either shelved, or released directly to DVD instead of theaters. The movie is written and directed by Mark Brown, who penned the screenplay to the beforementioned Barbershop pictures, but instead of delivering the witty banter that made those two films somewhat enjoyable, Brown takes a heavy-handed approach to the dialogue, that ends up rivaling that of Tyler Perry’s films.

The movie tries to cram into its story a hodge poge of offensive stereotypes, including the abusive blue-collar boyfriend, the gay male stylist, the gold digging female and the attractive male who will only sleep with his white female clients. Outside of the shop is the dirty homeless man, two inconsiderate prostitutes and an unnatural pimp. Each of these characters is one-dimensional and is used primarily as a set-up for the movie’s lifeless jokes.

Fox (Ella Enchanted, Kill Bill Vol. 1) is merely adequate as Jenny, and ends up serving as the only straight-role and truly likeable person throughout the entire course of the movie, with her time on-screen entirely wasted by her having to play off the rest of the movie’s disastrous ensemble. Terrence Howard (Pride, Idlewild) makes a couple of appearances in the movie and steals the show, but his time on-screen is for less than five minutes total.

A movie without personality and any sort of creativity, The Salon ranks at the bottom of the Barbershop and Beauty Shop spin-offs.

You’re Gonna Miss Me

*/****     YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME (NR)

Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, but no clear contributing factors have been found for why this psychiatric diagnosis can be found in young adults. There is strong evidence that suggests that the use of certain drugs can trigger the onset of schizophrenia, or that those suffering from schizophrenia use drugs as a means to overcome negative feelings. Schizophrenia and substance abuse are at the forefront in the 2007 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me.

Singer and songwriter Roky Erickson co-founded the psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators in Austin, Texas in late 1965. The group, which inspired later rock acts like Janis Joplin and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, was slowly forced to dismantle after Erickson fell hard into heroin, LSD and marijuana use, which led to trouble with the law and with Erickson later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Erickson would be sent to the Austin State Hospital and later the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Roky received electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatments. Once released, Erickson went into hiding and lived with his mother Evelyn, who did not believe in providing medication to control Roky’s schizophrenia. But a court battle in 2001 saw legal custody of Erickson granted to Roky’s youngest brother Sumner, who helped Roky receive medical treatment for his illness.

A 2007 Independent Spirit Award nominee for Best Documentary, You’re Gonna Miss Me has all the makings of what could have been a gripping look into a fascinating individual, but director Kevin McAlester’s debut film doesn’t spend enough time providing the audience with any perspective or insight into who Roky Erickson is, and instead opts to focus primarily on a feebly-told familial problem that serves more as exploitation rather than provocative filmmaking.

The movie delves into Erickson’s constant drug binges, but never details how Roky’s substance abuse might have led to his shattered mental state, and why the drugs seem to have had a more alarming effect on Roky than other artists. And just as quickly as the movie touches this subject, it rapidly switches to a family problem that has been poorly constructed on film and instantly leaves with it a lot more unanswered questions than it does answers.

You’re Gonna Miss Me strongly resembles Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston about a manic depressive singer and songwriter, but unlike Feuerzeig, McAlester doesn’t allow enough of a glance into the riches and the successes of Erickson. And while the movie presents some minor archival performance footage that gives us a glimpse into the fame once achieved by Roky, the film spends entirely too much time expounding his greatness, rather than showcasing it.

A documentary film focusing on a sad and tragic person, it’s unfortunate You’re Gonna Miss Me doesn’t give us enough knowledge into this man we barely even know.

I Think I Love My Wife

*.5/****     I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE (R)

Chloe in the Afternoon is a 1972 French film by director and screenwriter Eric Rohmer. The movie was the sixth and final film in Rohmer’s series of the Six Moral Tales, and follows a young lawyer named Frederic who begins to ponder the notion of cheating on his wife Helene when a former friend named Chloe arrives at his office and begins to hint towards wanting a passionate relationship with him. 35-years later, comedian Chris Rock has written, directed and starred in a remake of Chloe in the Afternoon, entitled I Think I Love My Wife.

Rock (Madagascar, The Longest Yard) plays Richard Cooper, a married man and father of two who is madly in love with his wife Brenda (Gina Torres), but has become extremely bored in their marriage, which no longer includes any sexual activity for the couple. Cooper admits to often fantasizing about other women that he comes into contact with on a daily basis, but has never once considered acting on the impulses.

But an encounter with his friend’s former girlfriend Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington) leads Cooper on a dangerous path, as the attractive and free-spirited Nikki takes Richard down a road of temptation that begins to threaten his successful career. Yet, it’s not until Nikki’s friendship develops into a deliberate seduction that Richard begins to feel conflicted and he soon finds his will, morals and marriage tested.

An overly familiar but watchable flick, I Think I Love My Wife’s biggest problem comes from Rock’s inability to find a suitable mix between the movie’s comedy and melodrama. Once the film’s tone shifts towards a dramatic element, the actors and the plot’s half-truths about relationships make the film worth considering, but all is eventually lost amidst the unneeded crude language and the unwarranted, horrendous conclusion.

Rock follows up his directorial debut in 2003’s Head of State with a much more serious and mature picture that shows that he has grown as both an actor and a film director, but his writing still leaves a lot to be desired. None of the characters in the film are ever provided much depth or backstory for their actions, and the lack of probing into their decision making serves as a hindrance to the story, and makes it less compelling.

Instead of focusing his story on the problematic relationship with Richard and Brenda, Chris directs the majority of the story towards Nikki, who should serve as the least likeable character in the picture, but comes off as the most relatable. And while this remake seems to have also been heavily inspired by some of Rock’s schtick in his 2004 HBO Comedy special Never Scared, most of the humor in the flick is tiresome and shows a true lack of originality on Rock’s part.

An uneven look at a troubled marriage and a world of temptation, I Think I Love My Wife is a standard relationship film that is better than Rock’s previous work, but still below average for most.

Away from Her

 

***.5/****     AWAY FROM HER (PG-13)

Sarah Polley is a former child star and an accomplished 28-year old actress and singer that has received acclaimed recognition in her home country and abroad for her work in the films The Sweet Hereafter, My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words, which also starred Tim Robbins and Julie Christie. In 2007, Polley makes her directorial debut with a film she wrote based upon Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” entitled Away from Her.

Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Christie) are now entering their 44th year of marriage, and Grant has become concerned for his wife who is becoming more and more forgetful by the day. Together, the two decide it would be best to enter Fiona into a treatment facility for Alzheimer’s Disease, which forces the couple to become separated for the first lengthy amount of time in their lasting relationship, while Fiona begins her orientation period.

But once Grant can begin to visit his wife in the treatment facility, he discovers that Fiona has not only forgotten all about him, but she has shifted all of her affection and love towards that of another man, who is actually a patient in the facility. As Grant’s marriage to Fiona and his personal happiness begins to crumble the more the two unfortunately grow apart, his love for his wife leads Grant to make a self-sacrificing decision in order to ensure Fiona’s happiness.

A poignant and eloquent piece of filmmaking, Away from Her’s beauty arrives through its delicate and straightforward narrative style that has been wonderfully crafted by Polley. The emotionally devastating effects of Alzheimer’s Disease serve solely as the backdrop to what eventually becomes a challenging test of love and fidelity that hits all of the emotional chords located within the heart and within the brain.

The subtlety found in Polley’s script allows the movie to stray far away from the Lifetime Original Movie it could have become, and instead develop into the engaging, touching and powerful drama that she set out to make. The picture is not told in linear fashion, which allows an audience member’s mind to race a few steps ahead in the story, but Polley directs the small-scale movie with a beautiful grace and allows her actors to completely own their roles.

Academy Award winner Christie (Finding Neverland, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is superb as Fiona, carefully losing herself and the audience in her role, while co-star Pinsent (The Good Shepherd, The Shipping News) is truly terrific as Grant, capturing the sadness and confusion of a distraught husband in fantastic fashion. Stellar performances from supporting cast members Olympia Dukakis (3 Needles) and Kristen Thomson also add greatly to the movie’s fine ensemble.

A compassionate and elegant character study, Away from Her is one of the more remarkable and oustanding films of the year.

Hot Fuzz

**/****     HOT FUZZ (R)

The 2004 independent picture Shaun of the Dead was a critical success both in the United Kingdom and the United States, and has developed a cult-like following among fans. The zombie-themed romantic comedy was written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, who had previously found success together with their hit British television show Spaced. The duo elected to join forces once again in 2007, with the creation of the satirical action flick Hot Fuzz.

Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is the most talented police officer with London’s Metropolitan Police Service, but his tireless dedication to his job leads to some jealousy felt by his superiors, who decide to transfer Angel to the small village of Sandford. Upon arrival, Angel has trouble adjusting to what appears to be an easy going and crime free small-town lifestyle in Sandford, where his partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) spends the majority of his time watching cheesy action movies and drinking at the local pub.

Several mysterious deaths soon begin occuring around the village, which elicits the attention of Angel, but the townspeople of Sandford and the rest of his police force pals claim all of the deaths were accidents and not murders. But Angel refuses to drop his investigation into the various deaths, and quickly begins to unravel the motives and the identities of those behind the outrageous, non-accidental killings.

Less of a parody and more of a homage to the Lethal Weapon-style buddy cop movies, Hot Fuzz is entertaining for the most part, but also slightly disappointing in the fact that it misses its target nearly as often as it hits it. The movie’s fun action sequences in its final act are a joy to sit through, as they are so ridiculously over-the-top and are executed in a wonderful mocking fashion, but the movie’s tremendously slow build, its lacking of any interesting character development and its failure to deliver clever pieces of dialogue make arriving to the climax a bit hard to handle.

And while the movie is supposed to be an exaggerated send up to the already amplified and overstated action flicks of the likes of Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, Hot Fuzz ends up making the crucial and unforgiveable mistake of starting to feel exactly like the movies it sets out to lampoon by showcasing easy to design cartoon characters, fruitless one-liners and too many moments were the gags cease to exist and a misplaced seriousness starts to kick in.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t succeed at certain times, as director Wright and stars Pegg and Frost obviously have a great working relationship and chemistry formed with each other that comes across on-screen. Their dead-pan delivery and well-executed filmmaking style makes this parody seem like a much smarter and clever version of The Naked Gun, as opposed to the embarrasing slapstick nature of disposable comedies like Epic Movie, Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Move.

A fun film that pays more respect to the bad-action film genre than it does spoofing it, Hot Fuzz is a slightly uneven picture that begins to run out of steam before the true fun in the film begins.

Sicko

***.5/****     SICKO (PG-13)

Controversial Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore was the driving force behind two of the highest-grossing documentaries of all-time: 2002’s Bowling for Columbine, which explores the motives behind the massacre at Columbine High School and other violent acts with guns in our nation’s history, and 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a harsh critique on the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Three years later Moore returns with another politically charged and controversial documentary, Sicko.

In the movie, Moore investigates the American health care system, focusing primarily on the industry’s for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. Throughout the film, Moore highlights both insured and uninsured Americans who were either denied health care by insurance companies or hospitals, or have had an extreme amount of financial struggles from the costs they have had to endure when trying to battle against serious illness.

Moore also spends a tremendous amount of time on comparing America’s for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies with the universal or non-profit health care systems in Canada, Cuba, England and France. Moore also interviews 9/11 rescue workers who volunteered to help with the devastation and the saving of lives following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but were denied government funds to help them through the diseases and illnesses they developed because of their efforts.

A disturbing documentary that serves as both propaganda and as a much needed wake-up call, Sicko is truly an affecting and entertaining picture. Unlike Moore’s last two documentaries, he spends a larger part of the film behind the camera and offers up less of the smarmy and cynical statements that have always made his movies a slight turn-off. Instead, Moore wisely allows the personal stories and the interview subjects to convey to the audience their feelings and the effects they have felt from this nation’s health care system.

These stories and the interview subjects are intensely effective and bring to light several issues that should transcend political backgrounds and ideologies, and instead speak to the basic human emotions. And while Sicko is based around a dreary and unfortunate topic that allows Moore to attack those he wants in his not-so-subtle way, Michael also throws in a dash of humor that makes the problems and the fight against them that much more powerful.

Moore’s liberal agenda is clearly present and unavoidable, yet despite the knowledge that the movie surely contains some misrepresented facts and the typical misleading editing that almost always accompanies this genre of film, the lack of grandstanding by Moore on-screen has allowed the finer points to stand out, and Michael has succeeded once again in making a motion picture that raises more than a few flags.

An accomplished and entertaining documentary, Sicko ranks as Michael Moore’s best documentary to date.

I Know Who Killed Me

1/2-a-star/****     I KNOW WHO KILLED ME (R)

Lindsay Lohan made her motion picture debut in 1998 in Disney’s remake of The Parent Trap, which also starred Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson. Lohan went on to star in the teen flicks Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, before transitioning in her career to more adult roles over the last year, with work in the late-Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, Emilio Estevez’s Bobby and this year’s Georgia Rule. In 2007, Lohan tackles her first adult film leading role in the alleged thriller I Know Who Killed Me.

Lohan stars as teenager Aubrey Fleming, who is shocked and stunned to learn that her missing classmate Jennifer Toland has been the victim of a gruesome murder. The following night Aubrey’s friends and her boyfriend Jerrod Pointer (Brian Geraghty) become deeply worried when she doesn’t show up to the movie theater for a late-night flick as expected. Instead, Aubrey is discovered days later laying on the side of the road, and apparently left for dead.

But Aubrey is able to make a full recovery, despite the loss of one of her legs from what appears to be a night of torture that closely resembles the events that led to the death of Jennifer Toland. But Aubrey doesn’t recall any of her family members and friends, claiming that she is actually an exotic dancer named Dakota Moss. Dakota starts to piece together the mysterious puzzle of what she thinks has happened to Aubrey, and why the mix-up has occured between the two of them.

A heavy-handed and overly ameaturish film, I Know Who Killed Me unquestionably marks a career low for Lohan. The movie, in which Lohan’s career almost comes full-circle with her playing two characters ala her work in The Parent Trap, is a sleazy attempt to showcase Lindsay in scantily-clad clothing writhing around a stripper’s pole and using alcohol, drugs and odious vulgarity as a means of making her seem more adult-oriented and relatable.

Prior to her recent off-screen problems, Lohan has been a young Hollywood starlet who has actually been able to make a name and a career for herself based off of her actual on-screen abilities, which recently looked to provide a promising future for the star. But this flick is a gigantic misstep, and the actress’s poor material selection for her first grown-up film role is unpleasant to watch, as this entirely incompetent and incoherent movie does nothing more than exploit and misuse Lohan’s true talent.

The picture should have been a direct-to-DVD mess, as it is one of the more wrongly handled low-budget torture tales to arrive in theaters. Debut screenwriter Jeff Hammond loses track of most of the movie’s characters, and all of the script’s shocks and surprises miss the mark. Director Chris Sivertson never improves upon the film’s troubled script, immutably basking the screen with colors of red and blue that never serve as any honest form of symbolism, and actually diverts your attention away from the story’s happenings.

A trashy and terrible film from beginning to end, I Know Who Killed Me is a movie made up entirely of awful acting, awful directing and more than awful storytelling