Solace **½ (2015, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Abbie Cornish, Colin Farrell, Marley Shelton, Xander Berkeley) – Movie Review

Director Afonso Poyart’s 2015 serial killer thriller provides a good role for the 77-year-old Anthony Hopkins – it’s the main role, when parts for Sir A are difficult to organise. He grabs it eagerly, not too eagerly, and hits the spot pretty square on. Mind you, he is the film’s producer. He even does a bit of running!

Hopkins plays a police psychic doctor called John Clancy, who is called back into working with the FBI by old mate Special Agent Joe Merriweather (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to help him and his co-worker Agent Katherine Cowles (Abbie Cornish) hunt down a prolific serial killer. The movie has a couple of unusual ideas – the police psychic and the serial killer, who believes in providing the solace of the title for his many victims.

He’s nutty enough not to see himself as a serial killer at all. He’s a good guy in his head, putting folks out of their misery. Mmm, interesting! I won’t tell you too much, it’ll spoil it. Hopkins’s psychic gifts include knowing whether to turn left or right in a car chase, indeed he really has a gift second to none, though a close second is the psychic police dog that threatens to take over the movie, till the dog idea’s swiftly dropped. A psychic police dog? Mmm, interesting!

Director Afonso Poyart’s movie is slick and fast-moving, as well as tense and nasty in places, if not always very convincing. With acting and direction above average, the problem here is the screenplay by Peter Morgan and Sean Bailey from a story by Ted Griffin, which has way more than its fair share of loose end and confusing developments. Even, or especially, the ending is muddled and muffed.

Yet it remains entertaining and involving, and is not at all bad for this kind of thing. Yes, it’s hokum, and a tiny bit hammy, and more than a little contrived, but so what? It kind of works. It kept me aboard and alert all the way up till the climax. It keeps its mysteries unfolding bit by bit in engrossing classic fashion.

It’s Brazilian director Poyart’s first Hollywood movie after his Brazilian debut with Two Rabbits (2012). He says: ‘The film has an influence of Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, but tries to flee the genre. I do not think Solace is a serial killer movie, it is only its outer layer. In the background the film is much more than that, talking about life and death, and raises some interesting moral dilemmas.

The script originates from a re-written script intended to be a sequel to Se7en.

Principal photography began in the last week of May 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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