Judging by the number of recent movies starring Keanu Reeves, he may have taken criticism of his band Dogstar to heart and decided to stick to his day job. So he hired the director of Dogstar’s videos to help this project wherein he too would try playing a bad guy.
Reeves is smug serial killer David Allen Griffin, who after strangling a bunch of women in L.A. follows his burned-out, basket-case FBI pursuer Joel “Captain Barbiturate” Campbell (James Spader) to Chicago when the poor guy cracks under the pressure of their weird symbiosis and flees the coast. Soon the killings begin again, this time endangering Campbell’s sympathetic analyst (Marisa Tomei, who only shows up long enough to get menaced). It’s your typical obsessed-cop-meets-maniacal-genius routine, with all the obligatory chases, pyrotechnics, and terminally annoying shaky-cam you might expect. The Watcher does eventually manage the slightest hint of suspense, but it never even attempts addressing Griffin’s motivations, other than that he might have been driven nuts by being named after a country/western singer.
Reeves is a likable, entertaining screen presence when he’s right for the role. But he’s almost made a career out of discovering how many characters he’s completely inappropriate for, such as nuclear physicist (Chain Reaction), attorney (Devil’s Advocate), vampire hunter (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), and now psychokiller. It’ll be interesting to see if the proposed Bill & Ted 3 materializes, although with the demise of pop metal it’s tough to picture them in anything besides “Bill & Ted: Behind the Music.” D
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