I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0-7407-0672-1
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2000-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Jennifer 8

(Directed by Bruce Robinson; starring Andy Garcia, Lance Henrickson, Uma Thurman; 1992)

Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the story line turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: “Hi! I’m the serial killer!” This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its tortuous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Somebody should have taken a hard look at the screenplay and decided that it wasn’t finished.

The movie stars Andy Garcia as a big-city detective who is recovering from a bad marriage with a cheating wife, and returns to the smaller city where his brother-in-law (Lance Henriksen) is a cop. Within minutes of his arrival, he’s digging through a garbage dump in search of body parts, and in no time flat he’s on the trail of a serial killer.

Deducing that a severed hand belonged to a blind person (yes, the fingertips are worn down from reading Braille) and that it was in a freezer for a long time, Garcia runs a computer search and discovers a pattern: Eight blind women have been killed and mutilated, all with .22 revolvers, within a 300-mile radius. (The fact that it takes a computer to discern this trend reminds me of the classic line from Fargo, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”) This is obviously the work of a serial killer, Garcia announces, only to arouse the fury of the local cop (Graham Beckel) who was on the case of the original missing woman.

The movie turns into a police procedural as Garcia interviews the blind roommate (Uma Thurman) of one of the missing women. Before long they have fallen into a particularly unconvincing love affair; I didn’t believe it because Thurman, usually so alive in her roles, here interprets her character as a soggy zombie who occasionally musters a smile. At Christmas she gets all dressed up to go to a party, but retreats in tears to the bedroom after she loses her way and everybody talks loud at the same time. That wouldn’t stop any of the blind party animals I’ve known.

The movie has no insights about the blind, other than they benefit greatly from talking alarm clocks and don’t need any lightbulbs in their bedrooms. Blindness is simply another plot gimmick in a movie with so many it can hardly remember what corner it’s currently cutting. Like many needlessly complicated movies, it plays long—real long—and it’s a relief when John Malkovich appears, at about the ninety-minute mark, playing an FBI man (I think) who accuses Garcia of murder.

The murder in question has to be seen to be believed. One cop climbs a fire escape into a building where he suspects the killer is hiding. He tells his partner, “If anyone comes down this fire escape but me, shoot.” Somebody else comes down the fire escape, shining a flashlight into the eyes of the other cop, who of course stands in full view to make himself a better target, and does not shoot.

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