Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

	HIS NAME IS EARL And he struggles with an unusual addiction in this over-plotted, under-reasoned thriller.

In an episode of NBC’s hit sitcom “The Office,” buffoonish boss Michael Scott tried his hand at writing a screenplay. The result, called Threat Level: Midnight, featured a super-powered super-spy, a comic ethnic sidekick, karate chops on airplanes and the amorous ministrations of Catherine Zeta-Jones. If Michael Scott ever penned a serial killer thriller, it might look a lot like Mr. Brooks. This is a film that tries so hard to be “intense,” on so many different levels, that it’s intensely silly.

To start with, there’s the eponymous anti-hero. He’s an upstanding businessman by day who hunts and kills innocent strangers by night — a psychopath so disturbed that it takes two ’80s movie stars to embody him. Kevin Costner plays Earl Brooks, who just wants to be a good family man, and attends 12-step meetings in an attempt to quash his urges to kill. William Hurt plays the urges, personified as “Marshall,” the inner demon who’s invisible to others but never far from Brooks, whispering naughty advice in his ear.

Clearly, writers Bruce A. Evans (who also directs) and Raynold Gideon are trying to return some psychological complexity to a genre where serial killers increasingly seem like comic-book evil geniuses, invincible and inscrutable. But their script isn’t up to the task, and neither is the acting.

Given his history of all-American-boy roles, Costner gets some points for being sinister. But all the actors who’ve shone as unassuming psychos, from Anthony Perkins to Kevin Spacey, have had a hint of something anarchic in their eyes — a chained animal, waiting for its moment. Costner just looks blank. He doesn’t convince us that Mr. Brooks hates and fears his dark side, either. Bickering over whom to kill and how, Costner and Hurt resemble nothing so much as an old married couple — or two over-the-hill thespians camping it up in dinner theater. They seem to be having more fun than we are.

The same can’t be said for Demi Moore, as the homicide detective on Brooks’ trail, who appears to be clenching her jaw hard enough to snap. Here’s where the movie really gets Michael Scott-like, as the writers strive to fold 10 hackneyed plots into one. Moore’s character boasts a vast personal fortune and chases killers strictly for the love of justice. She’s currently being pursued by another at-large psychopath, who wants to punish her for putting him in the clink. As if that weren’t enough, Moore’s in the midst of a messy divorce from a hot younger guy. (Insert bad Ashton Kutcher joke here.) And . . . she has a bumbling ethnic sidekick. Really.

Though the detective’s soap opera intersects with Mr. Brooks’ story, its real purpose seems to be to jack up the tension with scenes that involve mutilated corpses and pounding techno music. Other subplots are more integral, if not much more plausible. Comedian Dane Cook, sporting facial hair and an incipient double chin, plays Mr. Brooks’ would-be apprentice, a slacker who witnesses a murder and wants in on the fun.

Then there’s the killer’s darling daughter (Danielle Panabaker), who returns home from college with news that she’s pregnant, and a darker secret. Evans has directed Costner and Panabaker to treat each other with an affection that seems, shall we say, more than familial, making this relationship one of the creepiest aspects of the film.

The director’s so busy planting queasy suggestions of incest, though, that he fails to make any of these characters believable or sympathetic. Mr. Brooks’ victims, who inhabit the same glossy, expense-account world he does, remain mere mannequins. On a mechanical level, too, the plot fizzles, with an ending that seems to have been scripted by two conflicting test audiences. Though it tries to be both a cheesy thriller and a provocative character study, Mr. Brooks may leave you thinking even serial killers deserve better representation.