½*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia, David Strathairn
screenplay by Sarah Thorp
directed by Philip Kaufman
by Walter Chaw Ashley Judd's stab at In the Cut, Twisted washes out to be closer to a distaff Tightrope. It's just another Judd film co-starring Morgan Freeman, here played by Samuel L. Jackson. Once again humiliated and physically abused for her sexuality, Judd has this perverse penchant for self-mortification legitimized by yet another contractually required African-American mentor. What really wounds is that it's a movie with a pedigree and a little promise (unlike Judd's constant dalliances with the best of the airport bookrack), what with Philip Kaufman, back on the west coast in his favourite American setting of San Francisco, at the reins. A love of the City by the Bay is on display in a gorgeously-composed opening sequence that finds the Golden Gate Bridge floating on a bed of fog and, later, when the first body is discovered in Twisted's requisite corpse gallery against the nighttime backdrop of Pac Bell Ballpark, and there's an underlying menace to San Francisco that no one aside from Hitchcock has been able to capture quite like Kaufman, especially in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the possibility that this ostensibly dark psychological thriller might actually be good springs eternal for a full five minutes, exactly the amount of time that passes until someone utters the first of screenwriter Sarah Thorp's tragically over-written lines–and for us to rediscover Judd as an extremely limited actress whose best film remains the grossly underestimated Eye of the Beholder.
Officer Shepherd (Judd) is promoted to homicide detective, her prize for beating the crap out of rapist Cutler (professional wacko in these kinds of movies, Leland Orser), who nevertheless, because it's an Ashley Judd flick, first gets to cop a greedy feel. After Cutler gets to second base, the audience gets a good look, too, as Kaufman gives us a close-up of her ass shaking in a smoky bar in the requisite post-bust celebration in the requisite seedy cop bar. John Mills (Jackson), the police commissioner, has raised Shepherd from the time her father went on a murder spree that ended in his own suicide, and because films like this one and The General's Daughter prefer their female protagonists manifest family tragedies as terminal kinky slut-ism, Shepherd has a taste for picking up strange men in a waterside dive. The plot thickens once Mills promotes Shepherd to homicide detective, as the bodies of her past dalliances begin to pile up around her; because Twisted isn't just a rip-off of Tightrope, but Thomas Harris as well, before long Shepherd is soliciting the imprisoned Cutler for advice. (Like Brett Ratner's Red Dragon, the flick is essentially Harris for Dummies.) As her partner Mike, Andy Garcia gives his vocal chords a good workout, while Camryn Manheim overdoes it as a zealous pathologist.
The tension of the film, such as it is, revolves around the possibility that Shepherd is committing the murders without knowing it, seeing as how she passes out every night after one glass of red wine. Though she's established as a brilliant detective, the dullest member of the audience beats her to the punch in regards to the wisdom of continuing to drink something that she's either dangerously allergic to or is drugged. When Mike, something of a heroic slimeball who's constantly trying to get into Shepherd's pants, ogles Shepherd while she's unconscious, lights a cigarette, and unsheathes his gun, it's indicative of what ails the whole shooting match: childish sexuality and stunning obviousness. The unintentional laughter that drowns out the last hour of the piece causes one to wistfully imagine what this film would have been like had Brian DePalma been behind the camera instead of Kaufman.
It would be misleading to say that Twisted is a missed opportunity, because considering the cast and the premise, this flaccid corpse was dead on arrival. Any hopes nursed by its existence lay at the feet of Kaufman's participation, but except for a few beautiful shots, all traces of the artist behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are buried under tectonic offense. The picture is poorly written and performed, wholly derivative, eventually hysterical, and incomprehensible to boot. If Judd weren't so consistently dedicated to taking roles that assault her gender and intelligence, more outrage could be mustered and blame ascribed, but as it is, if you go to Twisted, you don't have much room to complain: it's exactly as stupid as it looks. The only surprise is that Judd hasn't been permanently relegated to embarrassing guest spots in fatuous garbage like Frida. Originally published: February 27, 2004.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Needlessly pampering the Joe VHS crowd, Paramount releases Twisted on DVD in widescreen and fullscreen editions: the former, which we received for review, presents the film anamorphically at 1.75:1, hardly an oppressive aspect ratio in this day and age. Treated in the ACE process to deepen blacks, the image is both inky (cinematographer Peter Deming's trademark) and misty (endemic in the work of director Philip Kaufman); some may feel that the transfer is lacking in definition, but the razor-sharp grain ends that debate. The film's 5.1 soundmix, offered in Dolby Digital, is nuanced but lacks impact at reference volume–and LFE information at virtually any volume. Kaufman contributes a feature-length commentary that's not half as enticing as his optional voice-over for ten deleted/extended scenes elsewhere on the platter, mainly because during the film proper he rationalizes his artistic decisions in tedious circles until finally reaching a cul-de-sac. An early remark that he borrowed an idea from his last picture, Quills, for Twisted's opening scene leads to disappointment as other intertextual links to his previous work (such as a genuinely funny quotation of Kaufman's The Wanderers) get overlooked.
It's in the 16-minute "Cutting Room Floor" section that Kaufman opens up about post-production battles that he evidently lost, as he loves all of the footage here (some of it–particularly Jessica's "dreams of oblivion" and the original, longer chase climax–for good reason) and lobbies, in not so many words, for its eventual reinstatement. What kind of world do we live in where Philip Kaufman is denied final cut on a run-of-the-mill Ashley Judd vehicle, which was only destined to make a set amount of money in the first place? Also on board are three New Wave Entertainment featurettes directed by Jeffrey Lerner that rehash the film's plot ("Creating a Twisted Web of Intrigue" (10 mins.)) and, more interestingly, meet with eloquent technical supervisors Maureen D'Amico and Dr. Forrest Fulton ("The Inspectors: Clues to the Crime" (10 mins.)) and find Kaufman giving a too-brief walking tour of his native San Francisco ("San Francisco: Scene of the Crime" (2 mins.)) that includes a stop at Tosca, the Kaufman-proclaimed "greatest bar in America." Previews for Mean Girls, Tupac: Resurrection, The Reckoning, and The Prince & Me round out the disc. Originally published: September 1, 2004.
96 minutes; R; 1.75:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French DD 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
