Mr. Brooks Reviews
Top Critic
This wannabe highbrow horror-thriller is a graceless, unfocused piece of work with a central narrative as tonally schizophrenic and wayward as its lead.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
Mr. Brooks spins a web that will wrap you up in nightmares.
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie is so well made, and so compelling as a portrait of a man at war with himself, that, right up until the end, many people will probably be entertained by its intricately preposterous story.
[Director] Evans keeps flirting with a potentially rich idea only to surround it with indigestible amounts of silliness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
Quite a few plot lines and character quandaries remain unresolved. And yet the movie makes sense as it stands. After all, one can never know what makes a psychopath tick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Certainly more genuinely creepy than many recent thrillers, and the supporting cast is effective.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
You know you're in real trouble when Demi Moore's playing the most sympathetic character you have.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Please don't tell me it was supposed to be played for laughs all along, because I don't buy it. Too late to save it from doom, the twists and snafus in Mr. Brooks start coming too fast for the audience to absorb, and the movie turns delusional.
In Mr. Brooks, Bruce A. Evans' fitfully subversive approach to the genre, we get a few fresh takes on the psychology of serial killing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film emerges as a subtle commentary on a disquieting aspect of our current culture -- a commentary on the nature of a masturbatory voyeurism and how it fosters heartlessness by turning other people into objects.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The kind of movie that rockets so far beyond the line of credibility and so deeply into the realm of utter stupidity, you start to wonder if the filmmakers aren't putting you on.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
I count a baker's dozen of movie plots here, a tally so impressive that the qualifier -- all of them are inane -- seems almost ungenerous.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
What starts out as a delightful black comedy and social commentary ends up, at best, as a guilty pleasure where I had a hard time sorting out the intentional from the unintentional laughs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Costner seems to be having some fun playing the respectable guy with an evil secret, but [director] Evans' murky storytelling just weighs him down. Cook has all the charisma of a misshapen mud pie.
Mr. Brooks has more tonal shifts than a Philip Glass concert, never deciding if it's a thriller, a noir, a comedy or a farce.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A classic guilty pleasure -- a great-looking, weirdly compelling thriller with two pedal-flooring performances from Costner and William Hurt.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
If it is not as sadistic as the Saw and Hostel movies, it is as malignant in its insistence on the omnipresence of evil.
| Original Score: 1.5/5
The film probably tilts the balance too far in favor of Mr. Brooks at the expense of the uninspired Det. Atwood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
[Costner] gives one of the best performances of his career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Mr. Brooks manages to be deeply loathsome -- no small feat for a film that's shallowly amateurish.
Mr. Brooks is driven more by its characters than its plot. And several of those characters are fascinating.
| Original Score: 3/4
It would be nice to report that Costner's bid paid off but Mr. Brooks, aside from the low-key menace he exudes, isn't much.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
What compels isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.
Slickly shot, coolly edited, oozing dark, deadpan humor, Mr. Brooks finds Costner at the top of his game. His moves are subtle, his expressions flat, his emotions clamped down, contained.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions.
If you broke down Mr. Brooks in terms of structure, twists and momentum, you might give it high marks. The thing does move. To where is the problem.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Mr. Brooks begins promisingly, but it grows steadily more preposterous as it goes along, becoming the first feel-good serial-killer movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
When your best character is a serial killer's imaginary friend, you know your movie's in trouble.
It should provide discriminating audiences the antidote they seek to Clooneys-and-Caribbean fever, while giving Costner's career a considerable kick in the credibility department.
Mr. Brooks is a curious mix of the campy and the intelligent, of high concept and low psychology. In spite of these contradictions, or perhaps because of them, it works.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Overdesigned characters and situations stretch plausibility at every turn.
If our movies are any guide, we're a nation of latent serial killers.
