Movie review: Mr. Brooks

I know, I know, another one... I promise I'll at least try to think of other things to blog about instead of just an endless stream of movie reviews/musings about Vincent D'Onofrio/fawning and having cognitive dissonance over the (conservative) guy from the news with the eyelashes. Now that that's out of the way.

I watched this movie on a whim; in fact, I didn't know that it existed until tonight, the same night I decided to watch it. I was reading r/unresolvedmysteries and someone happened to comment that the plot of this movie was similar to something someone else had commented about. I was drawn to this movie because the title and the eponymous (I love that word) character shares the name with someone I actually know. I will see this someone on Monday and at current I am debating on whether to share this information with them, that there is a movie with the same name as them. The reason I am debating over it is because the movie is about... a serial killer. I am not completely sure that the Mr. Brooks I know would be thrilled to learn that he shares a name with a fictional serial killer. (I wonder if he's already aware of the movie, either of his own accord or someone else has already informed him of this namesake) I don't really think many people would be particularly enthused about that, honestly. (also, watching this movie has made me sort of try to imagine the Mr. Brooks I know as a serial killer, but I just can't do it. He's too nice. [if you ever read this, Mr. Brooks, which I am really pretty sure you won't, but if you theoretically do, you're too nice for me to be able to imagine you as a serial killer, which is a compliment! A strange one at that, but a compliment.])

Anyways, on to what I thought of the movie. Having just recently watched Shutter Island, which was brilliant, this one didn't exactly compare. It was supposed to be a thriller, apparently, but it was rather/somewhat boring. I wouldn't say it was a complete waste of time or anything, but it certainly wasn't great by any means. There was sort of a dual plot going on, partly about Mr. Brooks and his addiction to murder (which is how he described it himself) and partly about a female detective who is after him and also going through a gnarly divorce. This caused the movie to feel disjointed, even though the detective is supposed to be hunting for Mr. Brooks. I didn't particularly enjoy the parts about the detective; she just didn't really click for me. She did however look sort of like the character Emily Prentiss from Criminal Minds. And also sort of like one of my mother's friends who is a Republican. For that matter, Mr. Brooks the murderer looked sort of like Daniel Craig (ever so faintly) in some instances and at other times (also ever so faintly) like James D'Arcy. If the pursuit of Mr. Brooks had been more explicit, it might have been better - if the detective had gotten a bit closer to catching him, I guess. Something like that. In one part, the detective and someone who has been assigned to bodyguard her are entering a house where they expect to find a suspect, with guns drawn and holding flashlights. And here is a nitpicky little detail (error, perhaps, in my opinion) I happened to notice. They are holding the flashlights wrong. In other things I have watched that involve law enforcement characters, they hold their flashlights in an overhand sort of grip (the fingers go around the top of the flashlight as opposed to the thumb being on top). In fact, in a certain episode of SVU you can see John Munch explain this very principle for yourself. I believe the reason cops (are supposed to, I guess, at least according to tv!) hold their flashlights like this is so that if necessary, it's easier to clobber someone with them. Try it for yourself, holding a flashlight in both ways, and it really would be easier to hit someone if you needed to if you hold it in an overhand manner. The SVU scene I remember specifically, but I'm pretty sure there have been some other scenes (in Criminal Minds, Law and Order CI, other episodes of SVU) where you can see some "proper" flashlight holding in action. I digressed there. A lot. (for the record, I did end up googling about this in the past, probably after seeing that SVU scene, and there was an article that came up about flashlight grips. Probably just google "flashlight grips" or something along those lines and you can read it for yourself.) 

I don't really have anything else to say here about this movie, except that next I think I'm going to watch Se7en, a movie also about a serial killer. Sometime in the nearish future, there'll probably be a review of that. 

tl;dr: a quick note about the content of this blog, I actually know someone named Mr. Brooks, the movie was average, it could've been better/more interesting but wasn't a complete waste of time, I go on a long tangent about how there is a scene where the detectives hold their flashlights wrong, this tl;dr, some ending notes. 

This was a better movie than Full Metal Jacket/Apocalypse Now because it didn't leave me with the feeling that I missed the point. I would even probably say it was a little better than Zodiac, perhaps because I didn't really know what to expect with this one, whereas with Zodiac I was familiar with the case and thought that they could have made an interesting movie out of it, yet they just weren't able to and it was a disappointment.