Our Mr. Brooks

That basement is packed to the rafters with all sorts of secret hidden panels and closets full of clothes and guns and money and fake IDs. Evidently, when they were building the house, his wife was not privy to the details of the basement’s construction, or Mr. Brooks murdered his contractor to keep the secret.

It is my belief that any movie in which a person murders his building contractor will gross in excess of $5 billion in its opening weekend because murdering your contractor is perhaps the fondest dream of every American who has ever done so much as install a new light switch. Mr. Brooks, however, is not that film.

It is, rather, a film in which the world’s most careful serial killer fails to notice that the blinds are open when he murders a couple in the throes of sex. “It’s almost as if I want to get caught,” Mr. Brooks muses in a rather transparent effort by screenwriters Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon to explain away one of the 342 plot inconsistencies in their magnum opus. Mr. Brooks is seen in flagrante killicto by a creepy guy (Dane Cook) who eagerly asks to be brought along on the next murder.

Suddenly Mr. Brooks merges the serial-killer movie with another Hollywood chestnut: One of those mentoring stories in which the noble old veteran teaches a green rookie everything he knows. (There are echoes here of 1972’s The Mechanic, one of the most peculiar movies ever made, in which Charles Bronson plays a cultured hit man with a hippie apprentice.) Costner played exactly this role in last year’s The Guardian. He even played it 19 years ago when he schooled Tim Robbins in the art of being a successful baseball player in Bull Durham, and he was only 32 then.

I assume Costner chose to produce and star in this film because he wanted to broaden his horizons by playing a psychopath. And indeed, in most respects, Mr. Brooks is your standard-issue Hollywood serial killer; which is to say, he possesses supernatural intelligence, godlike powers, and exquisite taste. He can move about undetected. He is a master of disguise. He can hack into computer systems. He has unlimited access to cash. He’s so rich he even owns a cemetery.

But this is Kevin Costner, after all. The last time he tried to play a villain, as a redneck kidnapper in an endless Clint Eastwood thing called A Perfect World, his character somehow morphed into a loving father-figure to the young boy he had snatched. And that’s what happens here, too. The really nasty ideas rolling around Mr. Brooks’s brain aren’t given voice by Mr. Brooks himself, but rather by an alter-ego named Marshall, played by William Hurt.

Of course, we know Marshall doesn’t exist, but movies are a very literal medium. The fact that William Hurt is talking about how to kill people rather than Kevin Costner means that Costner is spared having to speak the despicable words himself. Instead, Costner talks about wanting to quit, needing to quit, wanting to kill himself, needing to have the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, and so on.

We do see Mr. Brooks kill two people, but he’s so wonderfully neat about it there isn’t much to recoil from. And in the course of the movie (caution: spoilers ahead) he proves to be a very generous and self-sacrificing serial killer. He beams with joy at the news that his daughter is pregnant, and begs her not to abort the child. Later, when he fears his daughter, too, has become a killer, he weeps at the evil that has passed to her through his genes–and travels to her college to kill somebody else and throw the cops off the scent.

It’s not only his daughter whom he rescues. He also takes an interest in the plight of a sultry police detective played by–I can hardly believe I am typing these words–Demi Moore. She is a poor little rich sultry police detective worth $60 million who is being blackmailed by her ex-husband and his trampy lawyer. So Mr. Brooks kills the ex-husband and the trampy lawyer. She is also being stalked by another serial killer, so Mr. Brooks arranges for her to find that guy in such a way that she can kill him off and spare herself from his evil. What a guy!

Mr. Brooks is almost entertaining. It’s like listening to someone make a really dumb point, realize that he’s making a really dumb point, and try to talk his way out of his really dumb point only to deepen the logical hole into which he is frantically digging himself ever deeper. That kind of faux pas has a perverse fascination all its own. But it lasts five minutes at most. Mr. Brooks lasts two hours, and through some of those two hours, you have to watch Demi Moore attempt to speak an English sentence. That might be an acceptable punishment for serial killers, but what did the rest of us do to deserve such a stiff sentence?

John Podhoretz, a New York Post columnist, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.