Judd's Twisted Demise

Ashley Judd needs to stop. I hereby proclaim that the Ashley Judd thriller (and its imitators) has played itself out and needs to retire.

Sure, I enjoyed Kiss the Girls (1997) when it came out. Heck, I even thought Double Jeopardy (1999) was somewhat entertaining. But now there’s Eye of the Beholder (1999), High Crimes (2002), and Twisted (2004), along with the perhaps-promising Bug (2006), which is being directed by William Friedkin.

While visiting with my folks recently, my dad told me I had to see this great thriller playing on cable, but he couldn’t remember the name. If you know my dad, you know that’s not unusual. He never knows the names of anything, and half the time he sleeps through movies. It’s kind of his thing.

So I vote to watch House of Wax (2005), which looks humorous, but he realizes after five minutes that he has, yep, already seen it. So we turn to Twisted, against my will, and after fifteen minutes, he realizes that, indeed, this was the thriller he had been telling me about. “It’ll blow your mind,” he says.

Not only did it not blow my mind, but it wasn’t even twisted, not in the least. I called the whodunit during the first thirty minutes, even explaining why the killing was done and noting the other murders that had been committed. I even told my dad, who was probably asleep by now, how Judd’s character was knocked out to be able to do it.

In other words, this was a twisted thriller that wasn’t exciting or twisted and left me feeling gypped of two hours. The only thing that was the least bit interesting here was the main character’s penchant for casual sex. Such a thing isn’t really unusual in Hollywood, of course, but it is generally accompanied by some sort of romance or love story. Here, Judd’s character picks up a stranger and then has a kind of masochistic sex with him, and we never see him again. And this isn’t the first time she has done this. We learn that she is trying to find companionship, even following in her mother’s footsteps, but it’s still weird for a heroine to do such things. What happened to the good Ashley of yore?

What the casual sex points out is how everyone in this movie is twisted, which may be the point. The only good character is the one who is supposed to be bad, played by a very bored Andy Garcia. Twisted comes out demonstrating the Calvinist tenet of total depravity. The entire world is twisted, it claims, even the ones we think are good.

Grade for Twisted: 2