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Absence Of The Good

2000, Movie, R, 98 mins

Absence Of The Good: Review

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Still reeling from the recent death of his small son, Detective Caleb Barnes (Stephen Baldwin) and his partner Detective Glenn Dwyer (Rob Knepper) investigate the seemingly unrelated hammer murders of an old woman and her neighbor in Salt Lake City. When Caleb learns of the similar homicides of a farming couple, he assembles a suspect list comprising past inhabitants of the homes where the slayings transpired and one surname keeps popping up: Gaskin. Although distracted by his wife's ongoing grief, Caleb interviews the surviving Gaskin children, Jack (Silas Weir Mitchell), whose wife furnishes a credible alibi, and wheelchair-bound Sheila (Jennifer Buckalew), who appears to be in a vegetative state. Only Bart Gaskin, the probable killer, remains at large. Caleb must quickly trace his way through all the places once rented by the Gaskins before the current residents are singled out for murder, but there's also a chance the psycho will strike considerably closer to Caleb's own home. This is yet another run-of-the-mill thriller about a detective, on the trail of — what else? — a serial killer, who trades on his own suffering to hone his sensitivity to the vibrations of evil. Although the central concept of James Reid's screenplay — a rootless lunatic wipes out those who've found a serenity denied him — is a good one, the film itself falls short. Instead of spotlighting the displaced killer's bloody retrieval of an unstable childhood, too much screen time is spent dwelling on Barnes and his wife's personal loss. Nor are matters helped by the fact that Baldwin's performance alternates between somnambular stares and violent shrieking, with nothing in-between. But the film's worst sin is that it doesn't camouflage the real killer's identity. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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