Tortured - Another Bogus Dilemma

Oct

14

Tortured - Another Bogus Dilemma

≡ Category: Drama, Movie Reviews, Not Worth Your Time, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Suspense
Director: Nolan Lebovitz
Year: 2008

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

Writer/director Nolan Lebovitz must have thought, well, Jack Bauer tortures people every week on 24 and the audience loves him. Why can’t I have a hero who is “tortured” about having to torture a seemingly innocent man as part of his undercover gig with the FBI?

Well, in the cartoon universe of 24, Jack tortures people to avoid major terrorist attacks involving hundreds of thousands of lives. Anyone with half a brain knows that’s a bogus setup, but if it were actually the case, torture just might be justifiable.

But all Kevin (Cole Hauser) wants to do is bring down the head of a criminal syndicate. He is willing to torture Archie Green (Laurence Fishburne), an accountant who has supposedly stolen ten million dollars from arch criminal Ziggy, so he can preserve his cover, in the off chance that this will lead to him busting Ziggy. If the filmmakers thought this motivation was even borderline sympathetic, they miscalculated.

We see Kevin’s anguish in scenes with an FBI psychiatrist (Kevin Pollak) and his girlfriend Becky (the delectable Emmanuelle Chriqui) and I think we’re supposed to ask ourselves, who is more tortured, Archie or Kevin? Are the filmmakers kidding or do they honestly think this is a real question? Only a spoiled, upper middle-class poof who has never suffered a day in his life would think to come up with such an intellectually bankrupt notion.

The absurdities don’t end with the supposed moral quandaries.

After Kevin has pulled out all of Archie fingernails, he ups the ante by…are you ready for this…shocking him with a stun gun. You wait for Kevin to start inflicting real damage that Archie won’t be able to walk away from. After all, he’s being watched on a live feed by his employer. But somehow, after Archie’s nails get pulled, Kevin starts trying to talk him to death. Might there be a plot-related reason for that?

The opening of the picture is especially weak. Before anything has even happened, horror movie music by composer Nathan Barr is accompanying pictures of sunny L.A. Very dumb choice — the music is completely unmotivated. Here’s the right way — you have happy music, children playing in the suburbs, the camera moves towards a house and the music imperceptably darkens. In an uninterrupted CGI shot, you go through the walls and into a dank looking chamber where Archie is being tortured by Kevin. If the lead was being played by someone other than the blandly “heroic-looking” Hauser, the audience might have even been thrown off balance.

Most of the acting is fine. Lawrence Fishburne and James Cromwell are their usual reliable selves. But Cole Hauser? Why do movie producers keep hiring this non-entity? He isn’t sexy or dangerous-looking and he can’t manage even one recognizable emotion at a time, let alone several conflicting ones, as he’s required to do here. What’s the appeal? I just don’t get it.

As the absurdities piled up, and I lost interest in the characters, I started thinking about what the filmmakers were trying to do. Maybe they thought they had a cross between a torture porn movie like Saw and the television series, 24.

Tortured ends up being gimmicky and nonsensical for the most part. Despite the luridness of the material, it can barely hold your attention, and constantly offends both logic and even the most nascent sense of morality.

That said, director Nolan Lebovitz has a basic knowledge of film grammar, so Tortured isn’t too painful to sit through. If it comes on late night on HBO, and if you have insomnia, you could do worse.