The Horsemen (Jonas Åkerlund, 2009)
I saw an ad online for this movie a couple of days ago, as it had just come out on DVD, and I marveled that I'd never heard of this before. How could I have missed a mystery/horror flick starring two very big names (Dennis Quaid and Ziyi Zhang) and directed by a respected guy like Åkerlund? I've never been a big Åkerlund fan, but I know he's gotten a lot of critical respect for Spun, a drug comedy/action flick he made a few years back. And yet this, produced by Michael Bay no less, as far as I can tell went to a few festivals, played for a couple of weeks in five American cities, and then got dumped straight to DVD. What? And the premise was pretty darned cool, a kind of Seven ripoff based on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rather than the seven deadly sins. I'm all for Seven ripoffs if they're quality, so I knew I had to go rent a copy and check it out. And now I understand completely why it achieved instant obscurity. The Horsemen is, of the 25-30 I've seen so far, the worst movie of 2009.
Quaid plays Aidan Breslin, a detective with a background in orthodontics who gets assigned to a case after a cache of extracted, bloody teeth is found in the woods. The first body is found soon after, the wife of a prominent businessman (Peter Stormare) who has a number of adopted children. One of those, Kirsten (Zhang), has just turned eighteen and seems attracted to the recently-widowed Breslin. He, however, has his own problems dealing with both the death of his wife and the resentment of his older son (Southland Tales' Lou Taylor Pucci). Breslin is convinced that the murderers (for there must be four) have taken the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as their motif, and the case becomes a race against time--can they find the killers before they find themselves with more victims? Things get weird when one of the murders chooses to step into the light--and it's the last person Breslin would have suspected...
There was a great deal of potential here, but every time it reared its ugly head, it was soundly beaten down either by the pedestrian direction, the woeful miscasting (Ziyi Zhang's performance has been talked to death, no reason for me to do more than mention it here), or the script, which managed to get the big plot twists right, but lacks everything else. Breslin's actions are in many ways affected by the death of his wife, but other than being pulled out for a row with the kid and mentioned in order to set it up, we don't get any real sense of the thing. For that matter, we don't get much of that about anyone; we get told about the affectations of certain characters, but we never get a sense of those as actual pieces of their personalities. They're nothing but plot points.
Much worse than it would have been had it not contained the possibility of a good movie. Avoid like the plague. (half)
