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BY PETER KEOUGH
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If feature movies were only 10 minutes long, this loose adaptation from a Michael Pye novel would be a minor masterpiece. In nowhere Canada in the early ’80s (funny how the dates of those sepia-tinted flashbacks get more and more recent), a couple of teenage strangers meet on the road. U2’s "Bad" and the Clash’s "Should I Stay or Should I Go" back their flight from unhappy homes on balky bus and $200 junker as the pair journey together and begin to bond. Martin (Paul Dano, outstanding a few years back in L.I.E.), is quiet and awkward but has the poetic myopia of John Lennon in his Ono years. The other kid is brush-cut, battered, and a fan of beer. Something terrible happens, and coupled with a credit sequence that almost overcomes its obvious debt to Seven, this beginning says more about the psychopathology of a serial killer than anything that follows. That would be Angelina Jolie as Illeana Scott, the pseudo–Silence of the Lambs FBI special agent called in by Montreal detective Leclair (Tchéky Karyo) to help solve some recent killings. Not only does Jolie have bigger lips than Foster, she has bigger eyes, noting such apparently irrelevant details as Gena Rowlands’s blood-red fingernails and a tassel by the fireplace rustling, close-ups of which lead her and her unconvinced crew of local cops on an ill-smelling trail of red herrings. What Jolie doesn’t notice is how irritating Ethan Hawke’s performance is as Costa, a local painter who appears to have witnessed the culprit’s latest crime (Hawke can’t decide whether he wants to imitate James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Anthony Perkins in Psycho). What director D.J. Caruso (Salton Sea) doesn’t notice is that he’s let Jolie’s bogus allure take the place of a story and concept that might have been worthy of some of the films he imitates. (100 minutes)
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