DIRECTOR
Bill Paxton
SCREENWRITER
Brent
Hanley
PRODUCERS
David Blocker
David Kirschner
Corey Sienega
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Bill Butler
MUSIC
Brian Tyler
EDITOR
Arnold Glassman
CAST
Bill Paxton (Dad)
Matthew McConaughey (Fenton Meiks)
Powers Boothe (Agent Wesley Doyle)
Matthew O'Leary (Young Fenton Meiks)
Jeremy Sumpter (Young Adam Meiks)
Luke Askew (Sheriff Smalls)
Derk Cheetwood (Agent Griffin Hull)
Missy Crider (Becky)
Edmond Scott Ratliff (The Angel)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 100m
U.S. release: April 12, 2002
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
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When mainstream critics rave
about a horror movie, watch out. Frailty, this year's
winner of the Blair
Witch Overpraised Indie Horror Award, has a few fine
moments before turning gimmicky and twisty, but longtime horror
fans won't find anything especially fresh in this humorless and
derivative rural psychodrama. The pain and terror of watching
a beloved father go violently insane was handled far better in
Stephen King's The Shining; religious mania was done brilliantly
in The Rapture; a Texan family united by slaughter was
perfected in ... well, you know.
Frailty reminded me of Sam Raimi's two slowpoke rural
thrillers, A
Simple Plan and The
Gift; admirers of those films may take the following
with a grain of salt.
Making his directing debut,
Bill Paxton has picked a script (by Brent Hanley) that offers
him a plum role: a loving yet deranged dad. This means he gets
to kill people with an ax and volunteer to help his eldest
son with his math homework. (No, not simultaneously. Though if
he did, this'd be more my kind of movie.) Paxton plays Dad (the
credits provide no other name) as a decent, hard-workin' (an
auto mechanic), God-fearin' son of Texas who receives a visit
from an angel one night. The angel, clearly not of the soothing
Roma Downey variety, has bad news for Dad: the end is near, demons
walk among us, and they must be destroyed. In a later scene,
Dad -- in the closest, probably inadvertently, this sober-sided
movie ever comes to a laugh -- looks deep into the underside
of a car and sees the angel pointing a flaming sword at him.
"There's your trouble, ma'am," I imagine Dad telling
the car's owner on Monday, "there's a demon in your carburetor.
An angel pointed it out to me. We're gonna need to get a new
part in for that."
Dad's sudden mission to go
demon-busting distresses his elder boy, Fenton (Matthew O'Leary),
who suspects that Dad's cheese has slid off his cracker; Fenton's
younger brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) takes to the calling like
a natural-born killer, sweetly and obsequiously enabling Dad's
homicidal fantasies. There are two ways the script could've gone
from here, both of them interesting. It could've stayed with
the grim reality of living with a demon-slaying dad; or it could've
literalized the conflict and had Dad's victims actually turn
out to be demons -- I mean horned, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer demons. The latter would've been cheeseball, but it
might've been more fun than what we get. In a present-day framing
sequence, we keep going back to the adult Fenton (Matthew McConaughey
in one of his glowering, I'm-about-to-piss-a-fish-hook performances)
trying to convince an FBI agent (Powers Boothe) that he knows
who's been committing some recent murders dubbed the God's Hand
killings. Gee, there are just so many people in this densely
populated film the killer could be!
I was with Frailty as
long as it promised to be an adult thriller tackling the always-intriguing
topic of religious mania with some complexity. The script, though,
abandons the complexity almost entirely. Dad's victims do
turn out to be demons, of a sort -- one victim in particular
is presumably a wife-beating lout -- so, hey, maybe Dad is
doing God's work. The narrative leads to a twist, and then a
twist in that twist, and Frailty just becomes another
"clever" Chinese-box movie. There is the potential
for greatness and true horror in this film, and that potential
is dashed against such plot stupidities as a character being
kept in solitude without food for over a week and miraculously
not starving (did the angel sneak him Twinkies?), or the Dead
Zone rip-off chintziness of Dad laying hands on his victims
and then recoiling as he gets a peek at the past sins of the
"demons." Frailty, indeed, feels like Sling Blade
rewritten at a crawl by Stephen King, who is quoted gushingly
in the movie's ads; did he actually enjoy this lukewarm reheating
of his work, or did he just appreciate Bill Paxton and Brent
Hanley's sincerest form of flattery?
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