Movies about serial killers are typically from some detective's POV as he and we try to figure out just who the serial killer is. Why is it like this? Simply because if the audience isn't seduced into some sort of sympathetic relationship with the ostensible main character of the movie, that movie doesn't work. We've got to care about the main character, not want him or her to die. And, if the main character were the serial killer, well, it would be that much harder to make him or her sympathetic. So most take the conservative way out, allow the killer to be the focus of things, but make the sympathetic detective the main character, the one we can feel comfortable identifying with. Hampton Fancher's The Minus Man turns this all around, makes the serial killer the main character. Which isn't all that new, really, but, instead of establishing some sort of hierarchy of immorality whereby the killer is serving some vigilante conception of justice (Slingblade), Fancher makes his serial killer just as random and heartless as Early Quaid from Kalifornia, or, better yet, Henry, from Portrait of a Serial Killer. His name is Vann Siegert. He drifts around in a phantom-grey 1979 F-250. And he kills people (in a low-budget way), and he's done it enough that he even has self-imposed rules, and he's played by none other than Owen Wilson (in a Bottletrocket-ish role), ingratiating himself at every turn with his I'm-showing-all-my-teeth-Mom smiles, his wide range of shy shoulder shrugs, and a childlike diction which supplies a lot of the dry humor of The Minus Man ('If Doug did something bad to his wife, he sure picked a bad time'). None of this is kept from us, either. From the opening frames, when he does away with the down-and-out Caspar (Sheryl Crow, debuting), we know that Vann Siegert's our Minus Man here. What we don't know is why, and Fancher uses this generated need for explanation to pull us through the rest of the movie. It's a device, yes, one most often used when the middle parts are going to directionless enough that direction has to come from elsewhere. To look at it another way, the idea is that if we want the answer badly enough, we'll sit through anything to get it. But then anything stretches two artfilm hours, which is to say clever dialogue mismatched with an overly deliberate pace. Or perhaps perfectly matched, imperfectly conceived. Either way, it drags at times, though of course there's the necessary developments: the unsuspecting potential victim Ferrin (Janeane Garofalo), a postal co-worker/love-interest, the escalation/rising suspicion which results from too many bodies suddenly turning up, the injustice of killing those who don't really deserve to die--all the usual serial killer stuff. What's strong about The Minus Man, though, is that there's more. Specifically, there's serial killer Vann Siegert having bad enough luck to rent a room from the most deranged family in town. And he's supposed to be the deranged one here. As it works out, though, he quickly becomes something of a replacement for the family's missing daughter, and subsequently finds himself doing everything he can to keep that family sane. All the while of course leading his double life--killing people on the side with zero remorse, no passion. In fact, his 'killings' and the running monologue he keeps about his bad habit suggest that he either sees himself as some impersonal force of nature or wants to be that impersonal force of nature. Which is as close as we ever get to any explanation. So be it. Vann Siegert doesn't just talk to himself about it, though, either. As in Chasing Amy, he has a couple of imaginary friends to bounce ideas off of. But these imaginary friends, they're something of a cross between a David Lynchian 'projected guilt' trick and the little kid who beat up Keifer Sutherland in Flatliners. Meaning they 'bounce' ideas off him. Dwight Yoakum and Dennis Haysbert, FBI agents extrordinaire, who together comprise about 2/3rds of the law in The Minus Man. The other third is a real state trooper, whose presence allows an equally real Clay Pigeons type ending, which is the only intense scene in the whole movie. Better late than never, right? When all else fails, do what's been done. Fancher does, and it works, but just barely. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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