The River Murders - Film Review

Recently, I've found myself getting back into Law & Order since the original series has started up again. Seeing Amazon Video recommend this to me enticed me with the thought of fairly generic whodunit murder mystery akin to Dick Wolf's creation that I am remiss to say entrapped me into trying 88 Minutes back in the day. Like my previous experience, I discovered a film so bad that it actually started to get a little good by the end.

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Where You Can Find It: I saw this on Amazon Video where it is free to Amazon Prime members and also available for rent/purchase.

General Information 
The River Murders is a murder mystery film that was released on 1 July 2011. It was directed and co-produced by Rich Cowan and written by Steve Anderson. Dan Heigh provided the cinematography for the film, while scoring was done by Pinar Toprak. It was distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment under a limited release. Due to this limited release, it's difficult to tell what the film's budget was, nor how much it grossed when it initially released (I'm assuming it wasn't much). Critically, it neither has a Metacritic score, nor a Rotten Tomatoes rating, although it does feature a rather telling 9% Audience Score.

The Story
Homicide detective, Jack Verdon (played by Ray Liotta), gets caught up in a murder investigation involving a woman he once had a relationship with many years ago. There are elements about the murder that eerily point to Jack's past, which leaves the Spokane Police Department having doubts about its star detective's innocence. The FBI sends its own team of investigators, led by Special Agent Vukovitch (Christian Slater) to help the department, but this new level of scrutiny threatens to tear apart Jack's life entirely.

 

Going into this film, I wanted to take it seriously as the rain-filled streets and macabre crime scenes seemed to invoke a noir-esque style. My perspective changed fairly early on however, when the plot's characters began to open their mouths. This film has some of the worst dialogue I've seen in a long time, and this drastically impacts the tone that the film presents. Despite multiple homicides popping up in the city, several characters who are supposed to care are fairly ambivalent and even outright flippant about the whole situation while the antagonist's lengthy monologues lack hardly any substance.

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Jack's main drive as a character is that he just wants people to stop asking him about how many people he's slept with

 

The inclusion of Agent Vukovitch is arguably the most egregious example of this poor dialogue as he serves virtually no purpose in the plot besides hounding Jack about questions regarding the latter's sex life. The character is introduced as a crass-but-intelligent expert on catching serial killers, but there's hardly any sign of cleverness since he contributes nothing uniquely important to the case. His abrasive nature is equally confounding as it borders on harassment when he makes some very off-color remarks about Detective Thames (Sarah Ann Schultz). By the end of the film, one could argue that if Vukovitch was cut from the story entirely, it would have no impact on the overall plot.

An area where the narrative could have saved itself was with the antagonist. Fairly early on, the movie reveals John Lee (Michael Rodrick) as the killer, which removes all doubt about Jack's innocence. Had Steve Anderson kept this ambiguous, it could have provided at least a small level of tension. By showing its hand early, the story has little left to keep viewers hooked and my overall interest became greatly diminished once Lee started spouting random quotes from Christianity. The final monologue was easily the worst offender as it was jam-packed with meaningless religious jargon that felt like Anderson was hoping something might stick by the time the credits rolled.

 

Special Effects/Atmosphere

The River Murders does a solid enough job at conveying its setting and initially sets a very good impression by presenting Spokane as a river town that's one bad rainstorm from being washed away. Similarly, the costume design covers the basics, but it never really blows me away. There are some areas where the film seems to show its lack of budget whenever police work is involved. Things just don't feel professional in these segments as the investigators spitball ideas about who the killer might be in what appears to be a spare office equipped with a small whiteboard. I could understand if the group was planning a surprise birthday party that they might operate this way, but this is a serial killer investigation. The design of crime scenes is similarly haphazard and seems to lack any research prior to setting up. Combining these elements with the poor writing leads me to posit that the people involved in making this film presented what they assumed policing is like as opposed to actually figuring that out beforehand.

 

The Acting

I've always really liked Ray Liotta since his lead role in Goodfellas, but his role as Jack Verdon does his career no favors. Like the rest of the cast, he is entirely at the mercy of the script's awful dialogue. I generally bought his frequent looks of incredulity and bafflement throughout the film as I think there were more than a few scenes where Liotta (the actor, not his character) was in shock at what was happening before him. His chemistry with Gisele Fraga (who plays Ana Verdon) never felt quite right, and I never bought that Jack Verdon was some type of superstar detective.

Christian Slater is the one to watch in this film, but it's not because he's particularly good. Watching and hearing this poor man say some of the lines in this movie's script turned it into an outright comedy. The fact that his character has no overall impact on the film makes me imagine that Slater just walked on set and demanded to be written into the script so he could take cheap shots at Ray Liotta.

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Slater is unintentionally hilarious in this film

The rest of the cast doesn't really try in this, and I don't really blame them. Sarah Ann Schultz arguably makes the attempt, but she's fighting upstream (if you'll pardon the pun). Ving Rhames is in this I guess, and it looks like he spends most of his scenes imagining what he'll spend his next paycheck on. Michael Rodrick is completely forgettable as a serial killer, which may be an achievement on its own.

The Best of the Best: Witnessing Christian Slater demand Ray Liotta provide him with a detailed list of every woman he's ever had sex with throughout an entire movie.

The Worst of the Worst: The atrociously written dialogue.

Calhooey Score: 3/10 - Bad

Would I Recommend?

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Send this one downriver

I went into this movie hoping for a fairly middling investigative thriller akin to an overly long episode of Law & Order. Instead, I witnessed a wholly forgettable mystery with cliche characters and awful dialogue. It's not all bad though! If you're drunk enough and have some friends over, this just might be worth watching as a fun, bad movie. I can't possibly recommend watching this for any other reason though.

Spoiler Comments

• Although Sarah Ann Schultz looks very fetching in that disco outfit, I want to hear more about her friends who decided to host a 1970's themed party.
• I love describing this movie as "a murder mystery centered around Ray Liotta's sex life."
• How did the detectives at the first crime scene discover that the body had a ring hidden inside the victim's genitals? 
• I'd be a lot more understanding if the coroner found it, but these guys were standing out in the rain and somehow learned this little fun fact.
  
• Jack's name must carry considerable weight for Sung Li to return to prostitution again.
• Also, why did Lee feel the need to pose as a priest for this particular escapade? If anything, it might actually cause him to get turned away.
  
• I hope Ana learned her lesson about why guns can be helpful when a serial killer is stalking women in your neighborhood.
  
• If you mute the film during the scenes where Ving Rhames is writing down names on the white board, it looks like he's playing an intense round of charades.
• I burst out laughing when Jack walked Annie all the way to her apartment and only then decided to drop the bomb on her that she might be murdered by a serial killer.
  
• I'm curious what Vukovitch thought would happen when he asked Jack if he'd slept with his mother in front of two of his dearest co-workers and friends.
  
• How did Lee get his hands on so many fetuses? Is there a bank for that kind of thing? Why are they kept in little containers like Pokémon?
• I was ecstatic when Jack finally shot Lee in the face. It was unfortunate that was not enough to stop him from ranting about random Christian things...
  

References

(1) Jigsaw's Lair. (2017, May 11). The River Murders film image. Blogspot. Retrieved from: www.jigsawslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-river-murders-movie-review.html. 

(2) The River Murders. (2011). Jack Verdon image. IMDB. Retrieved from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1738387/.

(3) The River Murders. (2011). Stolen Fetuses image. Amazon Video. Retrieved from: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/906693178583842816/952350017199431680/unknown.png.

(4) The River Murders. (2011). Ving Rhames and Liotta image. IMDB. Retrieved from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1738387/mediaviewer/rm4116452096/.