D-Tox

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aka EYE SEE YOU
Movie Review by Dr Kuma

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Charles Dutton, Polly Walker, Tom Berenger
Director: Jim Gillespie

From the director of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER comes the all new, all inspiring I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST WINTER. I’m joking of course.

The new Sly flick takes huge lumps of Carpenter’s remake of THE THING, adds a bit of every ‘good cop on the rocks’ flick and finishes it off with a bit of THE SHINING/THE HOLE thrown in for good measure.

The story concerns FBI agent Jake Malloy (a good Sly character name that one) who is tracking down a cop killer. When the killer murders Sly’s future wife, he also kills Sly’s will to live too and he hits the bottle. His closest friend, Agent Hendricks (Charles S Dutton) suggests that Sly goes to a detox centre in Wyoming, run by an ex- cop, set up to help cops. Of course, this isn’t a film about Sly visiting a Betty Ford clinic and drinking carrot juice. No. This detox centre is an old missile silo, a remnant of the cold war (it has to be in the snows of Wyoming) and is more like a prison that a detox centre (it’s a story of how cops behave behind bars as opposed to drinking at them). Three people run this huge place; ex cop Doc (Kris Kristofferson), his assistant Hank (Tom Berenger) and psychiatrist and nurse Jenny Monroe (Polly Walker).

As I’ve mentioned the first 40 mins or so are predictable, but very gory. It’s when Sly decamps at the detox centre that things really take off, as unbelievably, the psycho that killed Slys girlfriend has followed him there (Sly thought he was dead of course) and is hell bent on killing all of the poor souls in the centre!!. As you can see, this is hokum even by Sly standards. It’s not all bad, just the bulk of it. To give you an idea; Sly finds the killers calling card ICU (the play on words that was the US title) tattooed onto the inside of one of the victims eye lids! Obviously all silo’s have that facility and the killer had obviously plenty of time to do it before the body was found? The dialogue is also pretty inane. One of the cops who has found religion turns to Jenny and says “Let your Faith will that bullet into his brain” as she protects herself against the killer, or my personal favourite, as Sly is being tracking in a terrible snow storm, the killer finds him and shouts; (you guessed it) Freeze!

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair on this film. It’s one of those movies that could easily fill a void on a Saturday night, but in reality, it really isn’t that good. Sly gets to grunt a lot in his Rambo acting style and the others obviously had a few days off in between projects to film their parts. One thing still puzzles me though – how can an ex-cop afford to buy a huge retrofitted ex-US command post? Obviously they are easily affordable. The other thing that confused me, where did the London Metropolitan police find the money (or even hear of the place) to send one of it’s members to the snowy wastes of Wyoming to detox?

Some of the staff who feature at the beginning of the film simply disappear, with no reference to them again, be they alive or dead. On reflection, this really is pretty daft, but watchable if the weathers bad and the only warm place to go is the cinema.

Dr Kuma’s verdict: Lots of snow. Not quite a turkey, but fowl in parts.

3 out of 6 stars