Review: Solace

When a serial killer case is proving tough to crack, FBI agent Jeffrey Dean Morgan and his less experienced partner Abbie Cornish visit retired doctor Sir Anthony Hopkins, an old friend of Morgan’s whose supposed psychic gifts has aided the agency in the past. Cornish is sceptical, and at first Hopkins (who still hasn’t fully gotten over the tragic and painful death of his daughter) is curmudgeonly reluctant to vacate his quiet hermit-like current existence to use the ‘gift’ he feels is more of a curse. He nonetheless signs on and soon deducts that the killer is similarly prescient. Kenny Johnson, Sharon Lawrence and Xander Berkeley play grieving loved ones, whilst Marley Shelton is Morgan’s wife, and Janine Turner turns up briefly as Hopkins’ estranged wife.

Released in Australia in 2017 on DVD and 2016 in most other places, this Afonso Poyart (whose only previous feature film was a Brazilian action flick called “Two Rabbits”) killer thriller started filming way back in 2013 (the distributor went bankrupt and then Lionsgate picked it up. ‘Nuff said, right?) and even before that the script was intended to be re-written as a sequel to the classic “Se7en”. Yep, Det. Sommerset was meant to develop psychic powers. That thankfully didn’t happen, and instead we get Sir Anthony Hopkins as a supposed psychic tracking down a killer who seems awfully intuitive themselves. Hopkins gives one of his better performances in recent years and is much more than this lame, utterly pedestrian film deserves.

Scripted by Sean Bailey (who produced the superior “Gone Baby Gone”) & Ted Griffin (“Ravenous”, “Ocean’s Eleven”, “Tower Heist”) but apparently largely re-written by others, this is TV show fodder, the sort of thing you can get every week on “Criminal Minds”, and frankly Poyart’s direction isn’t overly cinematic either. Or competent. Just look at the ridiculously rushed opening scene where Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Abbie Cornish (hardly bad actors, though Morgan is best utilised on TV) appear to have had their warm-up take filmed and Poyart just moved on to the next scene without being concerned with the truly amateurish acting going on. They improve throughout the rest of the film (Cornish’s wobbly Yank accent never does though), but Hopkins acts circles around them. Based on other reviews it’d appear that my view is a minority one, but Hopkins doesn’t seem to phone it in here. A great actor when he feels like it, there’s a haunted, tortured, and pained quality to the character and performance. Whatever it is that he believes he sees/senses, it clearly plagues him. When Cornish pushes him too hard, Hopkins comes at her with some hurtful, unfiltered truths. He clearly doesn’t much like having this intuitive speciality.

Aside from Hopkins’ performance though, the best I can say for the film is that it’s smart enough to have Hopkins’ character call his visions a ‘super-dooper form of intuition’. I can live with that, as I’ve always felt psychics were some blend of intuition, lucky guesses, and mathematical probabilities. I don’t believe they’re really psychic (that’s obviously absurd), and 99.99% of them are total bullshit scam artists, but that small other percentage certainly seem to have some kind of ‘skill’, albeit a more mundane, real world-acquired ability. On the downside, the screenwriters always have an excuse written in to have Morgan leave Cornish and Hopkins together, and not only is it an annoyingly heavy-handed Mulder and Scully partnership they’re setting up, but it also serves to alert the viewers on a late twist that should’ve been a bit better protected. Truth be told, I think the film could’ve survived without Morgan’s character being there at all, whilst Marley Shelton, Xander Berkeley, and Sharon Lawrence are all wasted in nothing roles. A famous actor plays the killer here and although the movie’s poster strangely spoils it, I’ll not reveal their identity. All I’ll say is that it’s far from their finest hour and once again I’ll place most of the blame on the relatively inexperienced director. The character should’ve been integrated into the film on-screen in some way earlier I think. Plot-wise this is a bit like “Suspect Zero”, in terms of quality…it’s a bit like “Suspect Zero” (with a little of the even worse “The Watcher” thrown in). Although there are some potentially weighty themes to play with here, Hopkins (who served as EP) is the film’s lone interest point. The rest is thoroughly routine, TV show episode stuff you’ll wonder how it attracted so many respectable actors. I did like the terrific little fake-out about an hour in that will probably fool you for half a second. That was clever.

A clichéd affair rather sloppily filmed by a director seemingly stuck with an ultra-tight schedule and only one actor prepared for work on the first take. Hopkins is terrific, but a feature film needs more original material than this or a more accomplished hand at the helm. You can definitely see why this sat unreleased for so long in most places. It’s subpar, though studio bankruptcy didn’t help, either.

Rating: C