Keanu Reeves in "The Watcher."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we gives this film a: Stars: James Spader , Marisa Tomei , Ernie Hudson , Chris Ellis , Keanu Reeves Director: Joe Charbanic Rated: R Length: 105 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(September 8, 2000) -- If willingly suspending one's belief were the same as holding one's breath, most people would require scuba equipment to get through "The Watcher." Or, to switch metaphors, you'd need a Heimlich maneuver after trying to swallow this malarkey.

There isn't a single moment in this debut film by director Joe Charbanic that rings true. Wait -- there are a couple. And they only attain the ring of verisimilitude because they sound cribbed from other movies. But then "The Watcher," written by David Elliot and Clay Ayers, is reminiscent of every serial-killer film of the past decade. And that's a lot.

James Spader, who used to be in good movies, plays Joel Campbell, a burned-out FBI agent who quit three months earlier and left L.A. to have a quiet nervous breakdown in Chicago after burning out on a particularly relentless case. But the serial killer he never caught, played by Keanu Reeves, gets no enjoyment out of his specialty unless Campbell -- and Campbell alone -- is chasing him.

So he trails Campbell to Chicago and begins murdering women again. But this time, the killer sends a photograph of the marked woman to Campbell a day before killing her. If Campbell can find one anonymous face in the big, bad Windy City, he can save her.

But despite a blanket media appeal that includes everything except projecting the girl's face in the sky, Campbell remains steps behind the killer. We are meant to savor his desperation as Charbanic cuts back and forth between the frenzied Campbell and the unsuspecting girl in a tedious simulation of suspense.

Campbell and the killer are two emotionally charged characters, full of wild-eyed passion and craziness. But Spader and Reeves are such interior actors that the chances of either one striking sparks in a scene seem remote. Together they have the spontaneous-combustion properties of damp socks.

Charbanic spices the proceedings with alt-rock video visuals, bouncing from a positive image to a negative and back again, or shooting grainy, jerky video to suggest scenes seen through the killer's eyes. Yet the plot has a connect-the-dots quality, with great leaps required that few thinking film-goers will care to make. It's as though Charbanic hoped that, by splicing a variety of visual tricks together, he could distract the audience from just how weak the script really is. He can't.

If "The Watcher" isn't actually unwatchable, neither does it offer compelling reason to stick with it, either.