Mr. Brooks (2007)

There is so much going on in Mr. Brooks, so much plot, that I assumed that it must come from a book, most likely one in a series of books, and not necessarily the first one in that series. I was wrong, Mr. Brooks was written directly for the screen, though it was originally intended as the first in a trilogy, so the sense that what I was seeing was part of a larger story is legit. The story is of a self reflective serial killer (Kevin Costner) who communicates with an apparition of a middle man (William Hurt) who only he see, so this can't help but remind one of Dexter, which first came out about a year before this movie. Given that point of reference Mr. Brooks doesn't really do anything that new, but it does what it does well enough to be engaging, and again there is so much going on that you really don't have time to get bored.

There are subplots about Brook's daughter (a 19 year old Danielle Panabaker), the police detective trying to hunt him down (Demi Moore) who is also hunting for another serial killer, plus Dane Cook as a wood-be acolyte, blackmailing Mr. Brooks with incrementing photos in order to get a thrill out of watching him work. There are also sub plots on subplots, like Demi Moore's pending divorce. There is so much going on, yet somehow they can hardly find anything for poor Marg Helgenberger to do, perhaps they were saving that for the sequels. While the movie did well enough, making back around 2 1/2 times its budget, for some reasons a sequel just did not come together, and now enough time has passed that it probably wouldn't work to revive as franchise. Still I'd be curious to know where they planed to take this, though I suspect that Dexter probably ended up going there, that show ran too long and had a good amount of filler. Right now I'd give Mr. Brooks ***, though I have my doubts if this would hold up well on repeat viewing.