 | DIRTY HARRIET
rating: 3
Clint Eastwood's striking daughter Alison is kind of a "dirty Harriett" in this eerie serial killer thriller. She plays a cop who doesn't mind stooping to illegal deeds to get her man. She's on the trail of a serial killer who is rituallistically killing off members of a local Catholic church. Her partner, writer Nicholas Cellici, is a stalwart man who tries to get his partner to play things a little more by the book. A top billed Judd Nelson fills out the useless role of an FBI priest (?) who is called in to explain the mysterious symbolism, and John Rhys-Davies plays a deaf priest who knows more about the murders than he's letting on. Filmed in a snowstorm in Saskatchewan, THE LOST ANGEL has a compelling sense of doom and Eastwood is quite fetching in her lead role. The identity of the serial killer took me by surprise, too. Not a classic but well done for its genre.
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Some really good acting couldn't redeem this movie.
rating: 2
I wanted to like this film. It had some really good acting by the entire cast, but that was not enough to hide the fact that the movie was just dumb. From the cover, the plot sounds promising. A serial killer is killing the members of a small church. The investigators are hampered in their investigation by overzealous internal affairs. OK. Not too bad. But the investigators are BAD cops. I mean, they shoot a guy and then make up a story about how he had a gun. They then shoot and kill the same guy later on in the movie. Then one cop strips a suspect naked and beats him up, while her supervisor stands there and watches. Ummmm, OK?
Then there is the weird devil-worhshipping subplot that goes nowhere, and a different but related subplot involving the protagonist's sister.
Finally, you learn that the kilings are motivated by one man's quest for revenge against the priest who sired him and then abandoned him. The identity of the killer is a big "twist" that was pretty obvious and then the movie ends.
If you want to see some good performances in an otherwise crappy movie, then rent this. Otherwise, give it a miss.
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