Worse Than Lohan's Driving
Written: Sep 15 '07 (Updated Sep 15 '07)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: none
Cons: inept writing, fetishistic direction, insanely bad performances
The Bottom Line: Lohan's acting is worse than her driving.
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| bilavideo's Full Review: I Know Who Killed Me |
There's a scene in A Clockwork Orange, where Malcolm McDowell is forced to watch movie footage until the very sight of it makes him ill. I know exactly what that feels like. Nobody propped me up, or forced my eyelids open, but I Know Who Killed Me is the kind of film that reminds you that torture can take many forms, some of them cinematic.
But to be fair, I Know Who Killed Me wasn't completely sickening. Sometimes, it was hilarious, especially watching Lindsey Lohan throw away her Disney image to thrill us onstage as a stripper. Until Britney Spears made her clumsy, listless "performance" at the MTV Music Video Awards, the title of "most boring sl*t" rightly belonged to Lindsey Lohan - a title she earned, fair and square, by trying to strip without actually stripping. It's not just that Lindsey keeps her top on, or tries to arouse us with her bikini bottom. It's the fact that she can't ride the brass pole she struts around. If anything, I Know Who Killed Me proves that Lindsey's acting is worse than her driving.
Compared to this one, Gigli was a masterpiece.
Just as you should never buy groceries on an empty stomach, you should never write a movie while flipping through previews. I Know Who Killed Me wants to be so many things, it has more identity issues than its main character - or its star. Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) is a Disneyesque high-school student living in a picturesque town. When we catch up with her, she's reading a short story to the rest of her class, a story of a troubled young woman on the other side of the tracks, someone who doesn't live in the Disney bubble.
Things go awry when Aubrey gets abducted by a sadistic madman who dresses in baseball caps and looks like a member of the Blue Man Group. What follows are scenes of torture so revolting, people cleared out of the theater in sheer disgust. When Aubrey is later found along the road, after making her escape, she wakes up in a hospital, convinced she is someone else: Dakota Moss.
Who is this Dakota Moss? Is she real or merely a figment of Aubrey's imagination? Did Aubrey invent her, along the lines of Cybil, as a defense mechanism to the horrors she endured? For Susan and Daniel Fleming (Julia Ormond and Neal McDonough), it's a troubling turn - perhaps more troubling than their daughter's near death and the amputations it took to save her life.
But we're not quite out of the woods yet. Even after Aubrey wakes up, the police release a false story - claiming that Aubrey has died. The idea is to give Aubrey an opportunity to get her memory back, so that she can identify the killer before he comes after her. This gives Aubrey an opportunity to explore a life which she, as Dakota Moss, denies as her own. It's also an opportunity for Dakota to begin an investigation of her own into what may have happened, behind the scenes, to bring her to this place.
Success, they say, has many fathers while failure is an orphan. But this film proves just the opposite. Where many films are undone by a single element - such as a bad story or lame direction - this film is a mess on so many levels, you could literally say that failure had many fathers. The script, by freshman scribe, Jeff Hammond, is a disaster. The dialogue is inane. The plot points are plodding, predictable and the twists both silly and unbelievable. Director, Christ Sivertson (The Lost, The Best of Robbers) takes an almost fetishistic approach to the sadomasochistic mayhem, which treats what ought to be a suspense thriller as if it were an outright torture flick like Hostel or Saw. The result is a nasty, disgusting, torture scene that extends what should have been short - and pregnant with implication - into something ten times as long, with enough grisly details to sicken the audience. In fact, it's frankly hard to watch the rest of the film after seeing something so graphic.
But if we could end it there, the film might have had some redeeming qualities. Unfortunately, it keeps getting worse, including the performances, especially Lohan's. Of all the wooden performances that populate this film, Lohan's is clearly the worst. Lindsey Lohan is not without talent. Cast in the right role, with the right director, Lohan could beat the odds and be the child star who survives adulthood. But she won't get there with films like this. The more she tries to show off her range, the more she is forced to say and do the silliest of things.
As I found myself stuck, watching the trainwreck, I couldn't help but wonder why Lindsey Lohan was making this film. It's clear she wanted to show off her ability to act, but there's nothing here that makes that possible. Furthermore, if she wants to be seen as an adult, why is Lohan pretending - yet again - to be a high-school student? No doubt, the stripper role appealed to Lohan's need to break free of the "Disney image," but if she had intended to smut it up, why do so in a bathing suit? What part of stripping does Lindsey not understand? If she wants to play a stripper, she's going to have to do so with less clothing than the bikini outfit she "stripped" down to. But if she has an objection to doing full frontal (perhaps the classiest thing about this flick), why take a roll that calls for it in the first place?
By trying to split the difference, Lohan is asking to be seen as a complete lightweight. There are lots of top actresses who don't strip down to their birthday suit - regardless of who's asking - but they don't take roles requiring them to go onstage as a stripper.
And while we're tossing around questions, perhaps we should ask whether it makes sense, regardless of how far Lindsey actually "takes it all off," to make her pretend to be a high-school student - particularly when she's 21. Even if Lohan could make up her mind about whether she wants to trash her Disney image or cling to it, why would any of us want to imagine her as under-age? Isn't there something seedy about inviting the public to imagine a high-school student onstage as a stripper? And isn't it unnecessary if the actual actress (who couldn't go through with it, anyway) is actually 21?
For the life of me, I couldn't find anything redeeming about this film. It contains some of the worst writing in recent memory. Its performances are awful. And its scenes of graphic torture and mayhem are simply so disgusting as to make you want to hurl your popcorn. I can't recommend this film to anyone except the interrogation staff at Guantanamo Bay. If the Gonzalez Doctrine can't hold up - and waterboarding has to go, along with other techniques that get in the way of the "quaint" protections of the Geneva Convention - maybe this film should be shown to prisoners, at least until they tell us the location of bin Laden. But if we're going to use Lindsey Lohan to go where Private Lindsey England never went, we should bring a box of toothpics. Without them, no prisoner will keep his eyes open. This film is literally that bad.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Everything
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Member: Bill Kilpatrick
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