Unspeakable



If you’ve observed Dennis Hopper’s career of late you’ve probably been wondering if there’s any part this man won’t take, any heights of overacting he won’t scale. If you manage to get one hour and twenty minutes into Unspeakable (2002), you’ll know that there aren’t. It’s all open to Mr. Hopper, whose performance in Unspeakable is to acting what several blows with a sledgehammer is to watch repair.

The problem for me as a reviewer is that I’m sure my description of Unspeakable will make it sound far more coherent and interesting than it really is. It’s difficult for me to describe how the tone of the movie veers from extreme to extreme, or how the narrative just stops dead for scenes at a time, or how little sense it all makes. My natural tendency is to make sense of plots, and so that’s what I will describe.


He's got "like" and "no like" tattooed on his toes.

In the opening scenes we see some police officers (border patrol?) watching a murder suspect, Jesse Mowatt (Pavan Grover, who also wrote the script) near the Mexican border. I’m not really sure why they didn’t just arrest him if he’s a murder suspect, but no matter. Mowatt disappears and the officers race off in pursuit.

The scene moves to high security prison sometime later. Psychiatrist Diana (Dina Meyers) is testing a machine called the “polyscan” on death row inmates. Basically the machine can pull memories from people’s minds and determine if they’re true or not. She’s been working with Cesar, who was convicted of killing a woman who got into his truck near the Mexican border. According to Cesar he was just talking to her when her brain fell out her head. Diana’s machine indicates this story is true, so she, as well as a social worker played by Lance Henriksen, try to convince the governor of the state (played by Jeff Fahey – and you thought Ah-nuld winning office was scary) to pardon Cesar. The governor, who is both running for re-election AND a former lover of Diana’s, refuses. Cesar is executed, but only after a lot of scenery chewing explanations of what the electric chair does to the human body by “The Warden” (it’s written like that in the credits, with quotes), as played by Mr. Hopped-Up… I mean Hopper. Perhaps the execution of this innocent man might have played more tragic if hadn’t scored it with carnival music someone bought a Danny Elfman yard sale.

With her star subject now dead, she needs someone else to experiment on. Luckily the Mexican authorities have captured Mowatt. We see them transporting him to the U.S., complete with attack helicopters following the convoy from the air. Yet they are keeping Mowatt in a smallish cage you might see for transporting largish animal, out in the open air on the back of a truck. In a scene that is supposed to convince us that Mowatt is a badass killer he tips his cage over and it falls on a police officer, killing him. Oooh… good thing the police didn’t think to manacle him to a seat in a bus or anything smart like that

Mowatt is transported to The Warden’s prison where he will be executed in a few days… Wait a minute, I thought Mexico wouldn’t extradite prisoners who face the death penalty in the States. In any case, diana gets a chance to hook her machine up to Mowatt, and has a few sub-Lecter conversations with him. The results of both of these activities are far less interesting than you’d think. Mowatt’s memories are of fairly mild child abuse, and his conversation is mostly along the lines of “I like living with my demons.” (His demons pay half the rent, and do laundry even if you don’t ask them.)

Perhaps in an attempt to give the movie some interesting element, Mowatt appears to have developed the ability to kill people at a touch, or at least cause them to commit suicide. This comes to a head at Mowatt’s execution. Mowatt managed to bite The Warden on the way to the chair, and just before the switch is thrown The Warden bangs his head repeatedly into walls and screams in pain, before killing himself by pulling his own face apart. It’s this scene that proves that Dennis Hopper will do anything if the check clears.


"Waterworld, what was I thinking?!"

Somehow Diana manages to call for an instant autopsy on The Warden, which is performed while the prison gets an acting warden in place and prepares to electrocute Mowatt. The autopsy finds that The Warden’s brain had been attacked by a certain kind of worm, and the worm causes extreme pain. Apparently Mowatt is infested with the worms and can deal with the pain, but if he passes them on to other people they commit suicide to make the pain stop. This is a halfway interesting angle in an X-Files-ish way, even if it does reduce evil to a parasitic infection. But because it’s halfway interesting, and this movie isn’t at all interesting, the worm angle is dropped as soon as it is introduced, and Mowatt inexplicably survives his own execution and Diana inexplicably arranges to meet him in an abandoned warehouse where he inexplicably goads her into killing him. Huh.

How is this entertainment? I’m not sure. The Unspeakable is muddled and pointless, and other than few overblown gore effects and Dennis Hopper blowing a gasket, there’s no reason anyone should blow their money renting it.

Posted: Sat - November 20, 2004 at      

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