# Minus Man, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Lars Lindahl

Review by Lars Lindahl (larsattacks@mail.com)

"The Minus Man" (1999) ** (out of four)

Written and Directed by Hampton Fancher

Starring Owen Wilson, Janeane Garofalo, Mercedes Ruehl, Brian Cox, Dwight Yoakam, Dennis Haysbert, Eric Mabius, Larry Miller, Brent Briscoe, and Sheryl Crow.

I remember first seeing the preview to this low budget serial killer indie with a sold out crowd in front of The Blair Witch Project. The trailer was strikingly original compared to most plot-revealing advertisements today. There were no clips from the film, just a young couple intimately discussing what they had just seen at the theater. In fact, their discussion was so intimate that the young lady involved forgot about her life guarding responsibilities at a local pool. Arriving late to her job, she finds two huge cadavers floating in the pool. The laughter, following this bizarre moment, roared throughout the theater. After this disturbing event, words flew across the screen, accompanied by a Danny Elfman-esque score, first declaring that you will talk about this movie for a long, long time, then listing a cast of familiar names including Janeane Garafolo, Merecedes Ruehl, and rock star Sheryl Crow. >From this experience, I told myself I had to see this movie and I'm sure everyone else around me did the same but for one reason or another no one did, including myself.

I finally got a chance to catch this one on video a couple of days ago and, sadly, it was not worth the wait. I think I understand why there wasn't a scene from the movie in the preview – there is not one interesting or stand out moment in the whole film, not one surprising turn in the plot, not one particularly noteworthy acting performance, not one musically charged instant. Not one of anything really, except a lot of torturously slow paced dialogue. From beginning to end, everything remains consistently low-key.Writer/director Hampton Fancher tells an original story but he does nothing else. My only reaction when The Minus Man ended was `So? Is that it?' Fancher spends so many pointless scenes doing nothing that, as time goes by, the movie begins to drag and drag. The movie is way longer than it has to be and still there is little to get out of it once it is over. For a film that guarantees to be a conversation starter, the only thing my viewing partner and I had to talk about were the numerous plot holes left annoyingly (and ntentionally?) unfilled.

The film starts with a questionable casting choice. Thankfully Sheryl Crow is only in Minus Man for a couple of minutes because her acting skills are very limited. She plays an innocent victim to a serial killer by the name of Vann Siegert. Played ndifferently by Owen Wilson, Vann is the last man you'd expect to be a murderer. He has deceivingly sunny blonde hair, he's sober, and he's a text book example of a polite do-gooder. So when he rents out a room in the house of the emotionally troubled husband and wife Jane and Doug (Mercedes Ruehl and Brian Cox), he is quickly taken in as the child the aging couple wished they had. Vann immediately after arriving at this ghost town ironically takes on the stereotypical job of a post office worker, meets a girl (the unpredictably banal Janeane Garofalo), and whenever he feels like it, poisons a resident of the town.

Very similar to American Psycho, except without all of the gory murder scenes, The Minus Man is full of superfluous voiceovers by Vann. Sometimes interesting but mostly irrelevant, these glimpses at a serial killer's mind never tell us why he does what he does. Fancher occasionally hints that mentally unstable Vann feels a certain amount of power when he kills, but unfortunately nothing is for sure.

Some of the scenes in which the viewer enters the chaotic imagination of Vann are wonderfully eerie. Our narrator has dreams about two police detectives (Dennis Haysbert and Dwight Yoakam) interrogating him with cruel language and violence. But, like most of the movie, nothing ultimately comes out of this part of the story.

The Minus Man is not as depressing or disturbing as claims it is. I wanted to like this movie and its actors but no matter how hard I tried, I could not. Kudos to Artisan Entertainment. This is an example of clever advertising attracting me to something I should have avoided.

    Grade: ** (out of four)

    Lars Attacks!
    A teenager attacks past and present cinema
    http://www.geocities.com/larsattacks00/

    larsattacks@mail.com
    (c) 2000 Lars Lindahl

    Do You Yahoo!?
    Get Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
    http://mail.yahoo.com/

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews