The Watcher

The Watcher is an interesting film with good acting, good dialogue, an unfortunate story and dismal special effects. James Spader plays Joel Campbell, a burnt-out retired FBI agent who lives in an untidy Chicago apartment and makes biweekly visits to a shrink played by Marisa Tomei. Campbell suffers from forgetfulness, depression, nightmares about his past, and migraines from hell. He takes pills and injections for all his miseries, which seem to have been caused by the terrible things that happened in his past. One day, a woman is murdered in his apartment block, and he recognises the murder as the work of a serial killer called David Griffin, played by Keanu Reeves. Campbell's horrible past is directly related to the fact that he tracked Griffin for five years in Los Angeles but never caught him. Now, Griffin is back, he's found Campbell, and he wants to play games. He begins sending Campbell photos of the girls he's going to kill, and Campbell has 24 hours to figure out who the girl is and save her. Working again with the FBI, Campbell begins a race against the clock to save the innocent victims of his arch enemy.

Well, if that doesn't sound like a lame plot to you, then you might enjoy The Watcher more than I did. After the cat-and-mouse antics of Along Came a Spider, which, incidentally is a better film, this one is tired and predictable. Spader plays Campbell as well as he can, and Reeves is – well, he's limited by his character's silly personality. He does things you would expect to see in a batman cartoon, like setting up an interesting contraption that will blow up if someone comes in the room, and then he takes Campbell there, like the bad guy in a James Bond movie, just so that Campbell can have a go at saving the day. The film was directed rather strangely. It's quite uneven, jumps about too much, and it uses a lot of blurry flashbacks to Campbell's tortured past. One scene that was not meant to be funny was met with laughter in the cinema because it had an overdubbed echo of Griffin's voice that went on for just a little too long. The special effects at the end of the film are, I'm sorry to say, rather appalling. We see a warehouse exploding and quite honestly I've seen fireballs better than these in 70's movies.