SUSPECT ZERO
By Steve Biodrowski
SUSPECT ZERO is like a Remote Viewing experience: by the time it's over, you'll realize you've seen it all before. The script takes an intriguing premise and runs with it—until it runs out of gas, sidetracked by a poorly plotted script and driven off-course by heavy-handed direction. There’s enough energy to keep it going until the very end, but you’ve reached the destination you may wonder whether it was worth the trip.
The film starts with its best sequence: Ben Kingsley, playing a mysterious figure, confronts a traveling salesman in a roadside eatery, disturbing him with a series of sketches he has drawn. “This one really says it all!” he snaps, voice on the edge of breaking as he flashes another drawing (unseen by the audience). After the frightened man drives away, Kingsley’s character pops up in his back seat, snapping on rubber gloves and ordering the driver to pull off to the side of the road because “I wouldn’t want to do this at 70 miles an hour.” Through the sequence Kingsley manages to appear appropriately threatening, but he also projects an underlying sense of tortured righteousness that will only make sense in light of later revelations. After the salesman’s body is found, the case falls to Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart), an FBI agent recently reassigned after some trouble in his past. The film then turns into a cat-and-mouse game, with Kingsley’s Benjamin O’Ryan leaving clues addressed to him, while Mackelway is troubled by headaches and disturbing dreams. After much slowly paced exposition, the film eventually gets around to revealing what the audience has already guessed: O’Ryan is a former agent killing serial killers. He has a special psychic gift (called “Remote Viewing”), developed as a psy-ops technique, that allows him to visualize crime scenes he has never actually seen. Mackelway's headaches, dreams, and professional trouble (he illegally pursued a suspect across the border because he “knew” the man would otherwise escape) are all signs that Mackelway has the same gift. Tired of seeing into the twisted minds of serial killers, O’Ryan wants to die and have Mackelway carry on his work for him. Along the way, a former love interest (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) gets thrown into the story, but the script doesn’t know what to do with her. And just in case the idea of Remote Viewing isn’t interesting enough, the concept of “Suspect Zero” is introduced as well: a serial killer who varies his pattern so carefully that no one, not even the FBI’s best profilers, even suspect he exists. Presumably, the idea of Suspect Zero is to provide O’Ryan with a white whale that only he can hunt down. (The script uses the phrase “fifty-foot shark,” in case we miss the Moby Dick parallel.) But with most of the story focused on Mackelway’s pursuit of O’Ryan, the elusive Suspect Zero never emerges as much more than a plot device, an anonymous truck driver incapable of generating much dread (unlike the unseen trucker Duel, for example, whose anonymity enhanced the suspense). Maybe that’s part of the script’s game plan, to show that O’Ryan’s Ahab-like quest is unhinged; he can’t battle his own demons by destroying an archetype of evil, because the actual killer fails to live up to size. But dramatically, it’s terribly anti-climactic. And it raises unanswered questions.
We’re supposed to believe that O’Ryan turned vigilante, at least in part, because his skill allowed him to track killers that eluded the agency. Yet in every case we see, his Remote Viewing reveals evidence that could easily secure a conviction in a court of law. So why has he turned vigilante, acting as his own judge and executioner? The film doesn’t say. We just have to assume that the psychic exposure to the killers he pursues has infected him—just enough to make him kill his quarry, not enough to make him a danger to the innocent.
This narrative weakness is typical of the whole film. With the emphasis on pretentious themes (identifying the hunter with the hunted, suggesting that the pursuit of killers can turn oneself into a killer), it should be little surprise that the actual plot mechanics are haphazard. O’Ryan was supposed to be part of an elite, secret FBI unit—so secret that no one in the FBI seems to know anything about it. And even though the Remote Viewing yielded results, we have to assume the agency just let the program lapse when the psychic strain drove the participating agents down.All of this might have been forgivable if the film had maintained a tight pace and kept the tension high. But E. Elias Merhige’s direction over-emphasizes fancy camerawork that detracts from the story instead of enhancing it. He likes playing around with grainy footage, optical distortions, and odd camera angles for the Remote Viewing and dream scenes, but the effects do little more than clue us in to the fact that we’re seeing something weird. They never create a memorable feeling of drawing us into the character’s psychological experience; it’s just flashy pictures that slow down the momentum.
Despite these failings, Kingsley’s performance manages to maintain some interest, but he is kept off-screen for much of the time, while the film focuses on Mackelway. Eckhart isn’t bad in the role, but he hasn’t got the kind of movie star charisma to carry the film solely on his own shoulders, nor does his performance bring enough depth to make Mackelway intriguing as the doppleganger-protégé of O’Ryan. Instead, he and Moss come across like a big screen incarnation of Mulder and Scully, chasing down an X-file-type villain while trying to generate some dramatic interest with their personal relationship—which goes nowhere, bogging down the main story while adding little of its own.The serial killer genre probably should have been retired after Seven in 1995. Subsequent films like Copycat and Hannibal only confirm this theory. SUSPECT ZERO starts with an interesting premise that seems as if it will be enough to resurrect the moribund genre, but ultimately the film turns out to be a rehash of familiar ideas. (Did you know that thinking like a serial killer in order to catch a serial killer can be disturbing to your psychic well-being? Yes, because I saw Manhunter back in 1986.) Unfortunately, SUSPECT ZERO treats these themes as if they were brand new and expects you to watch every frame with rapt fascination. By the conclusion, you may find yourself empathizing with the distraught anti-hero O’Ryan; like him, when the end comes, you’ll realize you’ve seen it all before.
