DVD Twisted (Full Screen Edition)

"Twisted" is set in San Francisco, where Jessica Shepard (Ashley Judd) has just caught a big time bad guy, been promoted to inspected, and assigned to the homicide department. She also has made a habit of picking up strange guys in bars, going to their apartments for some rough sex, and then going home and drinking wine until she passes out. It turns out that when she was a kid her father, who was also a cop, went on a killing spree before killing her mother and then shot himself. Jessica was raised by her dad's partner, John Mills (Jackson), who is now the police commissioner. At her new job she has a new partner, Mike Delmarco (Andy Garcia), and on their first case they find a body that has been savagely beaten and washed up from the Bay. It happens to be one of her one-night stands. Then another body pops up, with the same tell tale brand, and it turns out she slept with this guy too.

The rule with a film like this is that to play fair the murderer has to be above the title in the credits, which means we have only three suspects. We do not see the murders so we know that it cannot be somebody we have not seen and there is only one other remote possibility in the rest of the cast. But then I am afraid that based on the description of the film in the previous paragraph I probably gave you enough information to figure out who the identity of the killer. If I have indeed done so I think that rather than apologizing you should thank me, because going to see an Oscar nominated film that you have already seen would be more worthwhile than spending time and money on this one. Wait for it to come out on DVD so that you do not feel like you have been taken for such a ride.

Because she took one free shot against a psycho that was trying to kill her, Shepard has to go see a department shrink (David Strathairn), who attends his sessions wearing a gun. Of course he wants to deal with the fact that she tells everybody her parents were killed in a car accident instead of rehashing the horrible truth and she feels no pressing need to talk about the fact she keeps passing out at night and wakes up the next morning to learn about another dead body being checked off the list of her former lovers. But then the S.F.P.D. as a whole is not too bright: when the third victim pops up with the same connection they have Shepard's partner interview her for 5 minutes. Either (a) she is the killer or (b) the killer is someone she knows or who know here. Either way, a detailed examination of her life and habits would be in order.

For writing the cops as being stupid "Twisted" loses an additional star to go along with the two it loses for being so easy to figure out. The second sin is the greater offense, especially with "Twisted" coming at a time where so many films have been successfully playing mind games with characters and audiences. When you think of films like "Fight Club," "Memento," "The Matchstick Men," and other films of that type, even if they did not succeed in completely fooling you at least they were ambitious in the attempt. With "Twisted" I could not even find any good reasons not to think that it was who it obviously was, especially when the clue is just overacting..

I know this is the highest rating anybody has given this review to date, but I have a long- standing policy of saving one stars for reviews of snuff films.

We are both fans of good movies and, quite honestly, this film delivers the goods and sometimes more. It doesn't matter if you can work out the ending in advance, it is an extremely competent piece of film-making. Not an ewigkeitswerk perhaps, but very good all the same