½—one and a half sticks of doom

Imagine the movie Red Dragon. Pretty good, huh? Then imagine someone integrating a convoluted plot in which Gandhi kills the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Aaron Eckhart gobbles up aspirin with narcotic fervor, and a stony-faced Trinity is the patron saint of FBI agents. Then throw in a little Darren Aronofsky, and you've got Suspect Zero, a muddled re-telling of every serial killer movie you've ever seen.

My mother told me that if I can't say anything nice, I shouldn't say anything at all, so I will first congratulate Suspect Zero on not being needlessly gory. Also, there's a certain satisfaction in a movie where the serial killers are the ones being killed. Kudos to the filmmakers for stoking our sense of vengeance while minimizing the distress factor. Is that okay, Mom? Alright, so maybe I was tired, but there wasn't a single moment in this alleged thriller that had me so much as spooked. Not one. And this is me, Little Miss Afraid-the-girl-is-coming-out-of-the-television Karen. Ben Kingsley emerging from the back seat with surgical gloves on—ho hum. Ben Kingsley showing up unexpectedly at a carnival—yawn. I saw a scarier sequence on Adult Swim last night (it was a gender-reversed mini-film of The Shining, but we won't go into that now). Not that it's Ben Kingsley's fault. He certainly gave it his best shot, and if it weren't for him, this film would be much further down the alphabet than "B." But once I started remembering how cool he was in Sexy Beast, I started wishing I was watching that instead. Then I was thinking about that evil grinning bunny, which springboarded me to Donnie Darko, and pretty soon something else "troubling" was happening on the screen and I still didn't care. What, am I at the dentist's office here? Is it too much to ask that I be at least minimally entertained by a movie I just paid seven bucks for?

I was pleased to discover that the plot involved remote viewing, which I've watched a few Discovery Channel specials about. But beyond that nugget of novelty, there wasn't much that was more original than, say, Glimmer Man. (Steven Seagal as a Buddhist! Christ references! Grisly horrible deaths!) And in fact, Suspect Zero more than equaled that film's righteous excitement with itself, so that you can almost hear a shrill narrator prodding you to notice all the terribly significant things that are occurring on the screen. Look, more spiral imagery! Black holes! Circles with holes slashed through them! Something very important is being shown about the universe and about human nature!

Maybe that's why I wasn't scared. I felt like I was at an 8 a.m. history lecture, groggily taking down notes about the Ottoman Empire.

To his credit, Director E. Elias Merhige (who directed the terrific Shadow of the Vampire) knows how to frame a scene. He knows how to juggle a dozen surrealist bowling pins to keep you from noticing the shiny object in the center. And he knows how to turn on just the right amount of David Lynch atmospheric buzzing to disorient you while the characters go skinny-dipping in the reservoir of existential darkness. But when there is no substantive, engaging story to hold everything together, these techniques are just so much sound and fury—signifying nothing.