Mr. Brooks (2007)

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a ‘pillar of the community ‘cliché – a successful businessman with a loving wife and daughter and just an all around swell guy. What no one knows is that he also has a secret addiction and it’s nothing as common as booze, prostitutes or pokies. Nope…Mr Brooks just likes to kill.

To be fair, it’s not really his fault. Earl has an alter ego called Marshall (William Hurt), ever-present, menacing and very persuasive in goading Earl to kill again and again.

One night Mr Brooks is not as careful as always and he allows himself to be photographed murdering a couple.

I’m going to leave it at that plot-wise because the reason this psychological thriller works is that you just don’t know what is going to happen. Most Hollywood thrillers rely on the final, often lame, twist and everything that happens before it is just standard fare. Mr Brooks has plenty of plot twists and surprises throughout.

The concept of having two actors play Mr Brooks – Costner his everyday charming self and Hurt his cackling, homicidal other – is genius. The two work brilliantly together creating this wicked team forced to plot and scheme to stay ahead of various complication and enemies all the while indulging their addiction. Disturbingly, it also succeeds in making you root for the bad guy(s).

Costner’s career has mostly been in the toilet the last decade but he’s slowly starting to redeem himself with movies like this and Upside of Anger. Hurt is in top form too, always hanging off the edges of the frame laughing his lazy, psycho laugh.

I’m not saying Mr Brooks is perfect but you if you forgive it its faults, like Demi Moore as the poor little rich girl who’s become a hardened cop just to prove something to her daddy (yeah, right), you can have good two hours of fun and thrills with it.