Why do filmmakers do this to me?  They make a perfectly sub-par movie, then they give it a title like “The Absence of the Good.”  Logically, I’m forced to come up with a one-line quote like “It sure is.”  Because, naturally, the film features very little that is good.

The stupid-looking Baldwin (as opposed to the fat one, the talented one or the other one) plays a police detective haunted by dreams of his dead son.  Okay, we haven’t even gotten to the actual plot yet and already the movie is pissing me off—Baldwin’s detective is a dull, humorless detective, haunted by memories, surrounded by death.  It’s the exact type of detective played by Christopher Lambert in Resurrection, released two months ago by the same damn company.  Comparing the two offers no clear winner; Lambert’s over-acting is compensated by Baldwin’s complete lack of displaying any emotions whatsoever.  It’s the exact same detective character that’s been portrayed in countless other unmemorable stalker flicks.

    Never mind the lack of originality.  The concept just doesn’t work anymore.  Why, for example, are all these detectives so humorless?  They’d be a hell of a lot more interesting to watch if they took their life a bit less seriously, or at least smiled once in a while.  And why always the dead relatives?  Screenwriters in L.A. seem to be so desperate for ideas that they just sort of whip out the same tired clichés over and over without the slightest regard for irony.  Result: Dull, boring characters that we’re forced to watch.

    Anyway, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and Baldwin and partner Rob Knepper (not even the partner has a sense of humor in this film) are trying to track him down.  The killer’s prerequisite odd quirk is that he cleans up the house after the murder.  It all leads to two brothers and a sister who moved from house to house as kids, all of which were murder sites.  Meanwhile, angry police chief Allen Garfield rants and criminal psychologist Tyne Daly tries to get Baldwin to emote.

    Ugh.

    Unlike Resurrection, which at least had some style going for it, Absence of the Good is strictly by-the-number stuff.  Its tepid climax is made obvious by the halfway point, its characters are bleak and one-dimensional, and the murders themselves are off-screen and unimaginative.  If, for example, Baldwin was n interesting fellow to watch, this could have all been tolerable.  It’s not, though, and it drags on for an eternity, with several scenes that seem desperately stretched out to make this into a feature.
 
    One long scene of the cops looking through school records is interminable not only in its length but its pointlessness—why the hell aren’t any computers online at the right times in this film?  Why endless delays?  It’s almost as though they tried to recreate the monotony of police work by making us wade through all this tedium.  In fact, the entire movie could have lasted a half-hour if only a character who “remembers” some information vital to the case in the final third could have come up with it sooner.
You know, I don’t mind serial killer movies.  Sure, the genre’s been done to death, but there’s always ways to make a plot interesting—humor, characters, original plot twists, a sense of pacing.  Struggling exploitation filmmakers should take a good look at Absence of the Good and do exactly the opposite.

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