Twisted (or, "Wasted")

As a rule, thrillers don't have to actually thrill in order to be good. Comedies have to make you laugh, horror movies are supposed to frighten you, and weepy romances have a responsibility to make you cry. But when it comes to procedural thrillers, like a solid episode of Law & Order, these films only require a half-believable series of crimes and captures to keep the audience watching. Essentially, most movie thrillers are equivalent to that mystery novel you bought at the airport to distract you on a long flight -- and if it's not finished by the time you reach your destination, you'll probably never find out how it ends.

For about five years beginning in 1997 with Kiss the Girls, Ashley Judd made a name for herself starring in women-in-jeopardy-until-eventually-kicking-ass thrillers. The reviews were middling, but the grosses were not: after Kiss the Girls earned more than twice its budget, Double Jeopardy (1999) went on to make almost $180 million worldwide. And although Judd has since failed to recreate that kind of box office magic, no one could deny accuse Judd of failing to make a living doing what she was good at. We can only imagine Judd's disappointment that her character wasn't featured in the Kiss the Girls prequel, Along Came a Spider (2001), but she must have been excited (thrilled, you might say) at her reunion with Morgan Freeman for High Crimes (2002), a film notable for resembling -- in poster, trailer, and title -- a parody of an Ashley Judd movie.

Even then, however, audiences showed with 60 million of their dollars that they couldn't get enough of Judd's tendency to find herself in jeopardy until eventually kicking ass. Ashley Judd had it all figured out. But in 2004, she proved to have one cheap thriller too many up her sleeve... and boy, was it Twisted.

In Twisted, Judd plays Jessica Shepard, a San Francisco homicide detective with a very special problem: she can't stop sleeping with disgusting men, drinking herself into unconsciousness, and waking up to find her sex partners brutally murdered. This unholy alliance between her three hobbies -- solving crimes, having sex, and getting wasted -- is the setup for a series of "thrilling" events punctuated by frequent "hawk screech" sound effects, even though there are no hawks in the movie, but there are lots of seals. Isn't that twisted?

But whodunit? Twisted throws several unsavory suspects at the audience and dares us to figure it out. Is it the guy Jessica sleeps with who tries to kill her in the opening scene? Is it that guy's lawyer, whom she also had sex with? Is it her ex-boyfriend, who is obsessed with having more sex with her? Is it Jessica's new partner, who might have raped her? Is it her foster father, who also has an unhealthy sexual interest in her? Is it her poor therapist, charged with the task of sorting out her daddy issues? Perhaps the real mystery of Twisted is, Is there anyone Jessica won't have sex with? That's pretty twisted!

Frankly, we can understand the rest of the cast's participation in this plodding procedural, which is shot like an unexceptional made-for-TV movie and actually features not one, but TWO cast members from the legendary Riding the Bus With My Sister (D.W. Moffett and Richard T. Jones). Andy Garcia -- Hollywood's answer to the question, "What if we can't get Al Pacino?" -- dials his performance up to 11 at every opportunity, while Samuel L. Jackson escapes responsibility only due to the fact that he obviously must shoot a new movie every week or he will surely die. How very twisted!

Above all, of course, Twisted is a showcase for the worst performance Ashley Judd has ever given. The thing is, we're actually convinced that Judd is a talented actress, so it's just confusing when her line readings are so outrageously inappropriate, and accompanied by cartoon-like facial expressions suggesting that Judd has spent some time studying silent-era films and/or She's the Man starring Amanda Bynes. Can you imagine anything more twisted?

Perhaps the most twisted thing of all, however, is the fact that Twisted cost $50 million to produce. We don't have a clue where all that money went, but it sure can't be found anywhere onscreen. We would ask Ashley Judd for some answers, seeing how she plays a detective and all, but she's busy getting wasted right now. We recommend you do the same, right before settling down to watch Twisted.

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