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