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| The Spreading Ground (2000) Director: Derek Vanlint Writer: Mark Katsumi Nakamura Cast: Dennis Hopper, Leslie Hope, Frederic Forrest, David Dunbar Character: Johnny Gault Billing: 4th Plot: Five young girls are found dead, floating in bodies of water around Burman City. The police have no clues, and the killing continues until a desperate mayor makes a pact with the mob to find the murderer. Working to common goals, detective Ed Delongpre and hitman Johnny Gault both start to track down the killer. Review: What could have been a tense, but conventional serial killer story finds both its interest and its faults by throwing a few original features into the mix. Hopper puts in a strong performance as Delongpre, whose weary acceptance of yet another murder is dissolved into real emotion when his estranged daughter becomes involved, and this relationship, never explicitly explained, could be interesting enough to hold the film on its own. However, the introduction of Gault, the college-educated hitman for the Irish Mafia, both brings into the equation startling parallels, and dilutes the Hopper/Hope dynamic. Showing the two men on opposite sides of the law, both working to bring a killer to justice, is a fascinating exercise. However, the film doesn't stop there. The third protagonist is the killer himself, haunted by flashbacks to his past, and driven to kill by some mysterious incident long ago. Although the final meeting between Hopper, McCamus and Dunbar plays out some fine acting and moral questions, all three characters are lacking some development, and inevitably all three depend on some amount of cliche for the audience to understand them. Dunbar gets the rawest deal, given hardly any dialogue, but his childlike insanity and the device of never having his face totally revealed until the end are effective enough. Hopper, given the challenge of holding the film together, does the hard work with some aplomb, while Tom, in several scenes where he has no dialogue, plays good-guy bad-guy Gault with admirable seriousness. The feeling is that, had director Vanlint spent a little less time on eerie flashbacks and sometimes irritating slow motion, the oppositions between the three might have been more successfully demonstrated. However, for the performances of three fine actors and a taut, original script, a lot can be forgiven. Trivia: Gault's watch mysteriously keeps switching from his left to right wrists. Leslie Hope was also in First Degree, and Kim Huffman was in Murder Most Likely. |