Seals act as silent witnesses to a series of grisly murders in Philip Kaufman’s Twisted. Why they perform such a role is anyone’s guess, but there they are, leisurely sunbathing in the San Francisco Bay, appearing as sleepy and bored as audiences will likely feel while enduring this apathetic serial killer thriller written by Sarah Thorp.
Ashley Judd is homicide investigator Jessica Sheppard, a tough go-getter who doesn’t play by the rules at work (she likes to kick perps in the groin) or at play, which consists of habitually picking up random guys at bars. Jessica drinks lots of wine to mask the pain that her father saddled her with (he committed suicide after killing her mother), but regularly getting tipsy proves problematic when her former one-night-stands begin popping up dead.
Images of fog enveloping the Golden Gate Bridge foreshadow Jessica’s escalating inability to figure out if she’s responsible for the story’s killings, while Kaufman’s ham-fisted direction makes every meaningful clue stand out in stark pop-up book fashion. The red wine. The photo of Jessica’s dead daddy. The A-list actor who mysteriously disappears from the film for 30 minutes so we can forget he might have anything to do with the crimes. The film’s screenplay, filled with subplots that magically disappear when they’re no longer convenient and narrative misdirections that wouldn’t fool a seal, is twisted in all the wrong ways.
Although it’s fleetingly suggested that Jessica’s voracious carnal appetites might be related to her volatile temper, Twisted—unlike Clint Eastwood’s similar but superior Tightrope—is too afraid to intimately probe the sticky relationship between sex and violence. It also entirely drops the issue once the list of suspects has been narrowed down to two.
Ensnared in a film determined to play it safe, Judd, Andy Garcia (as Jessica’s partner), and Samuel L. Jackson (as the police commissioner and Jessica’s surrogate father) all go through the motions with unremarkable competence. Their performances are largely upstaged by those watchful seals, whose piercing wails during the opening credits convey despair over being forced to participate in such a rote suspense film for no discernable reason at all.
Image/Sound
Save for some haloing effects early on, Philip Kaufman’s Twisted gets a solid audio/video treatment on this DVD edition. The film’s aesthetic is a bit on the monochromatic side, but colors are vibrant and skin tones are excellent. The Dolby Digital surround track is equally solid: dialogue is crystal clear and the show-offy sound effects have great dynamic range.
Extras
First up is a gloomy commentary by Philip Kaufman, whose observations, especially those about the film’s sexual politics, are reductive and cloyingly literal-minded. That’s followed by three featurettes: the making-of doc Creating a Twisted Web of Intrigue; The Inspectors: Clues to the Crime, which briefly honors the real-life detectives that worked on the film; and San Francisco: Scene of the Crime, a quickie ode to the city of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rounding out the disc are 10 extended/deleted scenes and trailers for Mean Girls, Tupac Resurrection, The Reckoning, and The Prince & Me.
Overall
Twisted is a thriller only a misogynist could love.
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