Denzel
Washington plays the police force's foremost forensic detective
until an accident 4 years previously (part of a building
collapses on him) results in his being a quadriplegic.
Despite high
tech care he's basically vegetating intellectually
until the
case of a serial killer is brought to him. Jolie plays a
rookie cop
who gets his approval and acts as his legs,
supplied
with two-way radio and at one point a camera on her head. The
killer leaves clues (cf. Se7en) to tax his intelligence
and keep the mystery on the boil. In an awesome piece of
furniture removal the police department's technical resources
are moved to his bedside. If you can accept this you might
just swallow all the other implausibility.
Washington
holds the film together but this is really a story too far. This is
yet another screen detective who solves crimes just by staring hard
at objects and pictures. And of
course in the way of these scripts the battle between
hunter and killer gets personal. He even gets to fight the killer
using his electronically controlled bed which the killer obligingly
puts his head under.
This is not
Hitchcock's Rear Window or Silence of the Lambs
and what
lift it might give to someone who is really in Denzel's
bed I don't
know.
But the
really big question is why doesn't he get out of his
bed? Why
doesn't he get into a wheelchair and scoot off to
the police
station instead of bringing the mountain to
Mohammed?
Washington's character has the use of one
finger.
There are quadriplegics who don't even have that and
manage to
travel by car and train and plane.
In fact at the end of
the film he is seen sitting in a wheelchair which has been
previously standing against a wall. This is probably to suggest that
his condition has improved.
n.b. I've been told that
epilepsy is also part of his condition.
