CRESCENT CITY - Mark Reviews Movies

Crescent City, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2024

A serial killer is on the loose in Little Rock, Arkansas, but that seems to be a lower-level concern for the protagonists of Crescent City. Why should a dozen or so grisly murders get in the way of cop-movie clichés, broad melodrama, and a string of characters who seem to mainly exist to be red herrings?

It's not as if the prolific murderer here is especially unique or interesting among the countless that have come before in such movies—or that the killer's identity is difficult to determine pretty early into the story, for that matter. This killer murders without any apparent motive, which might be a good place for the investigation to start if these detectives actually did their jobs properly. Bodies are discovered headless and holding or close to the heads of mannequins in assorted places, and the best our trio of investigators can do here is to follow leads that don't seem to go anywhere.

Part of that, of course, is the game of Rich Ronat's screenplay, which starts to feel like a series of distractions from the fact that the truth of this murder mystery is far more plain and sillier than what's initially suggested by the setup. By the end, more basic questions than should be necessary arise about how the killer gets away with these things, how no one suspects the obvious weirdo right in front of them, and why the course of the investigation takes as many detours and last-minute twists as it does.

One could argue that the cops' personal entanglements, secrets, and biases are directly responsible for the serial murderer's activities to continue as long as they do here, but that suggests a smarter and more self-aware movie than the one we get. Ronat certainly has some of those things in mind, given that one of the main characters suffers panic attacks stemming from an unrelated killing that becomes a secondary mystery in the story. There's a throughline here of corruption and complicity that might have added a layer of cynicism to this routine material. Instead, it comes across as just another of several diversions to keep us from noticing the movie isn't effective at doing the simple thing it's trying to do.

The anxiety-stricken detective is Brian (Terrence Howard), a seemingly dedicated and devout man who has at least two secrets he's keeping from his police department, his church, and his wife (played by Reema Sampat). His partner is Luke (Esai Morales), who has the odd habit of dropping ominous details about his past without any prompting. The two are called in to look into yet another victim of the serial killer, and some random clues eventually lead them to a Satanic torture dating website and, after one of the victims turns out to be a fellow parishioner, Brian's church.

Maybe, all of this ties together in sounder ways than it seems. Honestly, though, who can keep track when Ronat keeps throwing complications and subplots and, especially in the third act, intentionally false information or betrayals or completely unlikely actions by anyone—particularly cops who think they've caught their killer—at us?

Brian and Luke's boss Capt. Howell (Alec Baldwin) assigns them a third partner in the person of Jaclyn (Nicky Whelan), an Australian born police officer who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and somehow finds herself a necessary part of a multiple-murder investigation in a completely different jurisdiction. None of that sits right with Luke, although not for the obvious reason that not a bit of that setup makes any sense. No, he's correctly worried that Jaclyn is actually looking into him and Brian, and if that's the case, it would be utterly ridiculous if, say, it turns out that Brian and Jaclyn have been carrying on an affair for six months while she's investigating him, his partner, or both of them, right?

Look, one takes what one can get from these cheap—both in terms of the budget and the actual content—thrillers. Ignoring the convoluted and contrived nature of the plot, director RJ Collins does provide something of an eerie air to the material (until the turns of the screenplay make that pretty much impossible), while the actors are good enough at the minimum they have to do. Howard is a convincingly tormented cop/husband/man of faith. Morales is sturdy as the ethically challenged one, and Whelan somehow brings a sense of no-nonsense professionalism to a character who, foundationally, gets involved in a lot of unnecessary nonsense.

Obviously, Crescent City is alternately too by-the-numbers and ludicrous to be any good as a thriller. It could have been much worse, though, so there's that, at least.

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