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Horsemen is a movie that should have worked. It had a lot of great elements, from cast to story to mood. But it didn’t. The story devolved into cliché and bumped along a heavily plot-holed road, actually adding layers back to the onion instead of the other way around. By the time it reached it’s frankly cornball and emotive conclusion, it won’t matter because you’ll already have stopped caring. Which is all too bad, because the promising first act is a nice genre-blender of torture film, police-procedural, and human family drama. How did it all go wrong? Well, sit back a spell and I’ll jaw on it.
Dennis Quaid is Aidan Breslin, a homicide detective with a recently diseased wife, two boys with a large age difference, and some strange specialization on teeth forensics. Which is what gets him called to a case where a platter containing the full complement of someone’s mouth is found beneath four trees each bearing the message “Come and See.” When actual bodies begin turning up, each in a different state of trauma (with most being hung from hooks through the flesh) all with the same message painted nearby, super-cop Breslin puts together that there is a team of psychos who think they are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, recreating the part of the bible intended to “lift the veil” and cause hell on earth. Now, all of this I was down with. The aftermaths of the murders were shown, so things were nice and bloody and squishy, but the murders themselves were only alluded to in flash cuts, thus defusing any patronizing prurience, and elevating the movie to something watched by adults, and not goth kids who think gratuitous onscreen violence is what makes horror great. Here we get good acting from Quaid as a tortured cop trying to bury his dead wife every day under the paperwork generated by his case, while further alienating himself from his kids, as well as a satisfying serial killer set up and more somber, macabre mood than Saw and Hostel combined.
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But then it all goes in the crapper.
First off, there is the unexpected confession of one of the killers. I will be purposefully vague to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say that you won’t see this confession coming…mainly because it is stupid. This character shifts gears once in confessing, and then again once put in jail. All of a sudden this character is some hardcore badass sociopath who laughs in the face of the police. No one suspected you, dummy, why confess only to go to jail and be a jerk to everyone? Doesn’t make sense. Then other bodies turn up, and lots of elements of story from earlier in the film get twisted and turned and retrofitted as the story first bounds, then limps, then finally drags itself along on its own bloody stumps. By the time we get to the We Are The Nothing website portion of the film, if you cannot figure out who the mastermind behind the carnage is, then you need a motherfucking brain transplant.
Patrick Fugit cut more than his wrists this time. | Alas, the end scene, where we get the whole story laid out for us, is just lame. I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense, but literally lame. Like a dog with three legs trying to catch a Frisbee. You give it full marks for effort, but you still wince and feel a little sad for it. We get to hear exactly what we knew was coming half an hour ago, and the syrup of sentimemtality is poured on extra thick, what with the Shakespearian dying monologue of the killer. Or did the killer die? Hard to tell through Quaid’s squinched-up-with-emotion-face. The end is unsatisfying to say the least. A slap in the face to those of us who watched the whole thing, trying in vain to keep the hope of the promise of the beginning of the film alive.
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A note on the cast: Quaid, obviously, is always good. Peter Stormare (the creepy blonde dude in Fargo) is always a treat to see, and kung fu fans will be pleased to see Ziyi Zhang (CT, HD, Hero, House of Flying Daggers) even if she doesn’t throw kicks or do wire-work. I was especially pleased to see Patrick Fugit (Wristcutters: A Love Story) and Eric Balfour (TCM remake, Six Feet Under) have a really bloody scene together…even if it singularly contributed to the demise of all sense and reason to the film.
And there you go. A film with a lot of promise, that is still worth watching, even if it absolutely will let you down in the third act. Director Jonas Akerlund mostly does music videos, and it is nice to see that it does not at all show in this movie. However, he should have showed more strength and conviction in his story, and not gone all limp at the end. Akerlund, you are on notice!
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