Ray Liotta has done a lot of direct-to-DVD garbage in the last decade, and you have to be an awfully big fan of his to sort through it all and still be able to give an objective report on which of his projects are diamonds in the rough and which ones are the rough. His performances vary from one film to the next despite the fact that he seems to play the same character in each. It’s as if he’s stopped challenging himself and just wants to keep his bank account in the black, and when that mindset takes over, standards drop in favor of zeros. Consequently, when you’re not a Ray Liotta fanatic but you’re still aware of the recent plight of his career, you don’t go into one of his films expecting much. Luckily, that means his films have the potential to be unexpected surprises, and this time around, that’s exactly what The River Murders is, a small little crime thriller which has just enough to carry a skeptical audience through to the end in spite of all its flaws and oddities.
The many former lovers of Detective Jack Verdon (Ray Liotta) are dropping dead across the country, and their bodies are recovered with items lodged in their vaginas, leading the FBI to place Jack as the prime suspect and one of their tope agents (Christian Slater) at the head of the investigation. As the bodies continue to stack up, Jack gets pulled back onto the case with his partner (Sarah Ann Schultz) and the trail becomes a bizarre twisted road lined with bible passages.
The film’s biggest issue is that it introduces the killer as a central character and makes no attempt to hide it or lead the audience down the wrong path. Where it hopes to catch the audience off guard is in the killer’s true identity, a twist which, while shocking, feels cheap in that it has no lead up in the prior events. It’s not like the audience could have made the connection themselves because the truth comes out of nowhere like a poorly written deus ex machina. On the plus side, it’s one of Liotta’s best performances in a long while, but besides Ving Rhames, he’s the only one giving it his all. Gisele Fraga, who plays Jack Verdon’s wife, suffers in her characterization because English clearly isn’t her first language and so every line sounds like someone sounding out sentiments instead of truly emoting. It all but destroys the drama that’s supposed to exist between her and Liotta, because their fights never sound angry but rather rehearsed at phonetic level.
DVD Bonus Features
The two audio commentaries on the disc will immediately disappoint you considering neither has Liotta, Rhames, or Slater among them, and only one has Director Rich Cowan. For what they are, both are quite lousy in their explanation of the film’s muddled religious theme and the creative choices made within, and that let down only continues in the subpar behind-the-scenes featurette.
"The River Murders" is on sale September 20, 2011 and is rated R. Crime, Thriller. Directed by Rich Cowan. Written by Steve Anderson. Starring Christian Slater, Ray Liotta, Sarah Ann Schultz, Ving Rhames, Gisele Fraga.
