Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.76%
Worth A Look: 12.29%
Average: 11.73%
Pretty Bad: 18.99%
Total Crap: 40.22%
7 reviews, 137 user ratings
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| I Know Who Killed Me |
by Erik Childress
"I DON'T CARE!"
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So it seems Lindsay Lohan’s career has come full circle. Once a promising ingénue brought up through the Disney factory, she is now jetting out looking for those adult roles that actresses find to shed that squeaky clean image. Only Lindsay has unfortunately made more headlines out of the movies than in and there’s little image left to be untainted. No sense in proving you’re a big girl now by playing a stripper when we’ve already seen enough crotch shots and nipslips in photos unbound by a no-nudity clause. But Lohan still has the edge over the Paris’ and Britney’s of the world by having a talent that a million drinks can’t take away; a proven one in films like Freaky Friday, Mean Girls and even one as uneven as Georgia Rule. I Know Who Killed Me must have been a script chosen in one of those bouts of playing Space Invaders with the brain cells though. And not just by Lindsay, but everyone involved. To accurately describe it, you would actually think I was drunk. Just imagine the worst possible idea for a Parent Trap sequel that manages to combine elements of Stigmata, Dune, The Empire Strikes Back, The Corsican Brothers and Blue Man Group. Yeah, this is a serious “Holy Shit!” kind of movie.Lohan’s Aubrey Fleming is a high school student who likes to write tales of dual realities. One particular one she reads in class sounds like a David Lynch remake of Sherlock, Jr. Either Aubrey is just flexing her imagination or there’s some deep-seeded need to escape from her current situation. Nothing out of the ordinary leaps to view. She lives in a great big house, has plenty of friends and though we won’t meet her parents (Neal McDonough & Julia Ormond) until later, there is no reason to believe they are anything but doting folks who let her come and go as she pleases. It’s almost too perfect for a teenager. All that changes one evening after a football game when Aubrey goes missing, kidnapped by a serious nutcase who has already claimed one victim from her school. His M.O. is to bound his victims and then remove their limbs by means of frostbite and instruments that looked as if they were designed by a team of Cronenberg gynecologists and Mr. Freeze.
Aubrey’s body is found after a few weeks sans a hand and a leg, but an odd revelation is made in the hospital. She claims not to be Aubrey, but someone named Dakota Moss who isn’t the product of wealthy suburbanites but a crackhead mother who died years earlier. Dakota reveals the same birthdate as Aubrey, but little else to an increasingly frustrated FBI duo who apparently just give up on the case entirely after their DNA turns out to be the same. (You might too if the local sheriff was once known as Cadet Leslie Barbara from the Police Academy.) Aubrey’s eternally befuddled boyfriend-in-waiting, Jerrod (Brian Geraghty), gets to enjoy the fruits of schizophrenic stump sex as Dakota’s stripper background obviously gives her a leg up in stranger humping. This is not just the second time in three weeks we’ve been witness to post-torture lapriding (Captivity) though since Dakota’s version of her amputation involves not a sicko getting his jollies off but a literal disintegration of her fingers while riding pole. Despite an ultrasound tape to the contrary, Dakota concludes that she must have a twin and she sets out to find her.
If you’re still awake to even care that there’s still a mystery to be solved, director Chris Sivertson does you no favors by lulling you into languid meditations of Dakota’s journey and the mystifying wisdom of bus patrons. Filmmakers sometimes love to use colors to hammer home their Freudian Freshman film school tactics of artistic design. I Know Who Killed Me may as well have been renamed “Red vs. Blue” and featured Halo’s Master Chief showing Lohan his warthog since Sivertson gives the two colors a Rock ‘em Sock ‘em faceoff to see which pretentious apparition of police sirens, football uniforms, blood, gloves, and blue roses will win out in the end. I’d rather have seen the finale of two crayolas swordfighting over who makes it into the sharpener first.
Somewhere along the way, Sivertson must have really championed what he was bringing to Jeffrey Hammond’s debut script, because it doesn’t have the cheap thrills aspect so common in the recent spate of torture horror. Sure he’s not adverse to showing deep close-ups of slow-sawing through Lohan’s hands. (Keep saying that five times fast if you hope to make it through the film.) But he really must have been going for the arthouse crowd with animated tattoos and the Gump-tion to follow rose pedals down a stream with no destination nor an ending to the scene. Maybe it was in the re-editing then that decided to use all available footage of Lohan on the dance stage in her bra and panties, crawling and twirling in such lazy fashion that its safe to assume the name of the club was the Slumber Lumber.
The gaudy Cinemax-ing of the film can’t disguise the fact that this is a shabbily constructed work of monotony that’s about as much as deconstructing persona and reinventing oneself as is the belief that the horny family gardener is somehow involved in Aubrey’s disappearance. Yes, even the herrings are red here. And he won’t be the last as Sivertson focuses on such out-of-left-field characters with no dialogue that the only possibility for a surprise villain is to be literally the last one you think of – which would probably be the one who has seen Santa Sangre one too many times. And when you get to the big revelation of who is responsible, apparently no one reading the screenplay said “hey, there’s no possible freakin’ reason on God’s Holy Damned Earth that this character could know who the other one is.” And yet it inspires the line, “I know who killed me.” Oh yeah, the one you never met involving a talent for a different kind of Broadwood.If you want to test the waters of I Know Who Killed Me in a theater, by all means press on. But if you want to know if the film has lost the audience you’re with, await for the scene with Aubrey’s fitting for a Jedi prosthetic and a leg that needs to be plugged in for added vitality (which inspires many jokes but no suspense later) and if someone looks at her doctor and yells out, “Hey, Crabman”, it’s ok to commence laughter from here on out. The most interesting scene in a movie filled with half-revealed revelations and stripper bodies turns out to be one between Lohan and Julia Ormond that’s the female equivalent of the Pacino/DeNiro confrontation in Heat. If Heat were about two actors at the doldrums of their career rather than the peak. I Know Who Killed Me is enough badness to put a serious stake into any actor’s callback status and would inspire the various “who killed my career” parodies without any misfortunes in their personal life. I will remember the film more for the two funniest death scenes to appear in any film I’ve ever seen than for the title which doesn’t refer to either of them nor the complete end of a still young career. Unless we’re referring to the director and screenwriter of one of the worst films of 2007.
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link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=16399&reviewer=198
originally posted: 07/28/07 04:40:17
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USA
27-Jul-2007 (R)
DVD: 27-Nov-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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