Ashley Judd is back and she’s brought another one of her nonsensical thrillers with her.
The biggest twist of this one is that the plot isn’t Judd being threatened by some horrifying man – like in her previous pictures Kiss the Girls, High Crimes and Double Jeopardy. Nope, in this one Judd just might be the killer, but don’t worry, she’s still threatened an awful lot.
In fact, with all these roles in which someone wants to kill her, one can’t help but wonder if her agent is trying to give her some type of hint.
Anyway, Judd is back to polishing up her World’s Worst Actress Award here, putting another coat on when no one else is even close to taking it away.
Meanwhile, Twisted is a trashy romance novel of a movie. Judd plays Jessica Shepard, an alcoholic police detective. After admittedly botching an encounter with a criminal during which she kicks a handcuffed felon in the face, she gets senselessly promoted to lieutenant.
Shepard’s still reeling from the loss of her parents when she was 6, and spends the nights drinking away her sorrows. And on the nights that she isn’t drinking, she’s going to bars and picking up trashy guys for a one-night stand (seriously, there’s maybe two guys who show up on screen that she hasn’t slept with, and I wouldn’t put them past her).
After being promoted to homicide, Judd starts on a case where the cheap men she’s been picking up in bars are turning up dead. Every night after she’s been drinking pretty heavily (which seems like every night in this movie), she starts having blackouts only to wake up and find out that another ex-booty call is dead.
Andy Garcia is her needlessly over-creepy partner, an obvious technique used by the director to make him look suspicious. But really, this is the type of movie where everyone’s a suspect; because everyone acts like they’re at least someone worth locking up.
Samuel L. Jackson also shows up for about 10 minutes of screen time as Chief of Police and parental guardian to Judd. It’s a boring by-the-numbers role that Jackson could do in his sleep, and almost does.
Simply put, Twisted is a movie that each of its actors and director has done before and better – except for Judd, who is always equally awful.
Brian Mulligan can be reached at mulligan@temple.edu
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