Costner seems to be having some fun playing the respectable guy with an evil secret, but [director] Evans' murky storytelling just weighs him down. Cook has all the charisma of a misshapen mud pie.
Comment
06/01/07
Mr. Brooks (2007)
56
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:149
Fresh:83
Rotten:66
Average Rating:5.7/10
Consensus: The setup is intriguing, but Mr. Brooks overstuffs itself with twists and subplots, becoming more preposterous as it goes along.
Runtime: 2 hrs
Genre: Detectives, Switching Roles, Thriller, Murder, Theatrical Release, Crime, Serial Killers
US Box Office: $28,424,648
Synopsis: Kevin Costner stars as Earl Brooks, a man whose seemingly perfect family and status in the community hide an ugly secret. Brooks constantly says the plea of an addict--the Serenity Prayer--but he's... [More]
Starring: Kevin Costner, William Hurt, Demi Moore, Dane Cook
Director: Bruce A. Evans
Reviews for Mr. Brooks
81 - 100 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
Mr. Brooks has more tonal shifts than a Philip Glass concert, never deciding if it's a thriller, a noir, a comedy or a farce.
06/01/07
A classic guilty pleasure -- a great-looking, weirdly compelling thriller with two pedal-flooring performances from Costner and William Hurt.
06/01/07
Top CriticA fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.
06/01/07
Welcome back, Costner. The hit-or-miss actor who earned an Oscar for Dances with Wolves but a Razzie for The Postman shatters expectations with his best performance in more than a decade.
06/01/07
It's not that Costner is a bad actor. He's just a one-note actor... like a male Julia Roberts. And this just isn't his note.
06/01/07
Despite a promising intro and some darkly cool atmospherics, the picture pushes plausibility to the limit with a story that is ultimately laughable, using every studio gimmick and characters that are poorly explored.
06/01/07
The film demonstrates the complexity of human nature and its faculties -- our sinful side is never far removed from our capacity to think and feel.
06/01/07
There's an unsettling exhilaration in the way "Mr. Brooks" plows through dark waters and damns every torpedo ... except for the one that sinks it. (Its name is Demi Moore. There's the germ of a great movie, but the disease of many stupid ones.
06/01/07
As long as Mr. Brooks remains focused on Mr. Brooks, the film provides a fair amount of thrills and (intentional) laughs.
06/01/07
Score one for Kevin Costner. His dark and disturbingly compelling psychological thriller Mr. Brooks could give the once powerful Dances with Wolves star his first hit in many moons.
06/01/07
Costner is sufficiently creepy, yet incredibly down-to-earth as Mr. Brooks. I must say this is one of my favorite performances of his in a very long time.
06/01/07
Costner proves that, given the right material, he's as good as anyone.
06/01/07
But for a movie about a guy who plans everything so meticulously, the script is a mess, with impossible coincidences and one big fake-out that is nothing but a giant bloody speed-bump on the way to the who-cares-at-this-point conclusion.
06/01/07
...cops a little of the cheerfully sanguine attitude of the Showtime series Dexter , although there's no effort to rehabilitate Brooks by half measures at work here.
06/01/07
Costner and Hurt's strong performances are surrounded by flimsy plotting, unbelievable sidenotes... and occasionally absurd 'surprises.'
06/01/07
...the film ultimately suffers from an egregiously uneven vibe that's compounded by a distractingly overlong running time.
06/01/07
If it is not as sadistic as the Saw and Hostel movies, it is as malignant in its insistence on the omnipresence of evil.
06/01/07
Top CriticThis is that rare Hollywood film where you can't be quite sure where the story is going to end up.
06/01/07
Comedian Dane Cook provides the real surprise here in a brave performance that more than holds it's own amongst the list of great talent involved.
05/31/07
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