Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Costner’s dark side

“Mr. Brooks” (Kevin Costner) seems to have it all — he is a wealthy, successful business owner who makes generous charitable donations, has just been voted “man of the year” by his local Chamber of Commerce, and has a beautiful wife (Marg Helgenberger) and loving daughter (Danielle Panabaker) in her first year of college.

But there he is at an AA meeting, announcing: “My name is Earl, and I’m an addict.”

Well, nobody’s perfect, right? Ah, but he’s no ordinary junkie. His drug of choice is not alcohol, cocaine, heroin or crystal meth.

No, Mr. Brooks is hooked on cold-blooded murder — he’s a schizophrenic psychopath known as “The Thumbprint Killer,” who, as the film opens, has been idle for two years but is starting to get itchy again.

Goading him on is his imaginary alter ego, Marshall (a wickedly droll William Hurt), who’s like the little devil on Earl’s shoulder, whispering words of bloody mayhem.

When Earl finally succumbs to temptation, however, he makes a serious mistake — and an amateur photographer who calls himself only “Mr. Smith” (Dane Cook) nails him at the scene.

Earl and Marshall expect Smith to go straight to the cops. But the greasy little weasel has something much different in mind — he wants Earl to take him along the next time he feeds his habit.

“If he tries to shake us down, we kill him,” Marshall tells Earl matter-of-factly. “We make it fun, but we kill him. End of story.”

The web gets larger and stickier with the introduction of other twists involving Earl’s daughter, Jane, as well as Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore), an overachieving, maverick police detective with plenty of her own baggage who’s been dogging the Thumbprint Killer for a long time and is as excited as she is rueful that he’s returned to action.

To offer even the smallest detail on how any of this plays out would spoil the fun of an intriguing meditation on the nature of evil and what happens when the beast who lives in each of us can’t be contained — all delivered by a first-rate cast.

Having aged past the point at which he can play the studly hero, Costner makes the move many other leading men before him have made and discovers just how fun it is to be bad.

Hurt is a great complement in a highly offbeat sidekick role; he and Costner have a morbidly funny rapport that qualifies as some of the blackest humor of any film in recent memory.

Director Bruce A. Evans, who also co-wrote the script with Raynold Gideon, leaves some plot lines not wholly resolved, and it’s the good kind of ambiguity that will provide for lively post-screening coffee-bar discussion.

The biggie on that score is the subplot involving Jane — is it really what it seems, or does her dad just see it as an opportunity for a little road-tripping fun?

My only serious complaint was the ending, a boneheaded cop-out that feels like it has Costner’s thumbprints all over it.

What should have been the ending — a brutal, shocking scene that fits the film’s portrayal of evil as a disease with possibly genetic roots — is a red herring; the real ending intimates that Earl may not be entirely irredeemable after all.

After a career of playing mostly roguish but upright good guys, it’s as if Costner just couldn’t allow himself to cross over completely to the dark side — an unfortunate false note that seems particularly tinny coming at the end of the film.

That aside, while this flick won’t make a major splash amid the big F/X extravaganzas storming the octoplex these days, “Mr. Brooks” is an improbably engrossing thriller that hooks you early and keeps you dangling.

3 stars. Rated R for violence. Opens June 1.