Rent Dark Crimes (2016)

Dark Crimes (aka True Crimes) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Jim Carrey’s role in this Polish drama is almost like a warning for him to never play Hercule Poirot. It’s not that Dark Crimes is akin to an Agatha Christie mystery; far from it with its dour and uncomfortably tense tale of murder, rape, and torture. I just found myself thinking such thoughts watching the aged actor try to muster an accent with a mustache and stumbling while doing so one could understand why his role is so quiet and lifeless. My thoughts drew to such casting when stuck with a film so unbelievably boring and vulgar that slogs through its thriller premise.

Carrey plays a detective trying to wrap his mind around the case of a foiled underground of prostitutes forced in sex and torture. Grizzly stuff but Carrey’s character doesn’t seem as appalled by the footage of such a place or the discovery of a connected murder. He drearily opens up this case to find a murderer. A possible suspect might be a horror novel writer with passages that resemble the way the victims were killed. It certainly seems suspicious. Better read his controversial book of torture one more time. Maybe three times.

This story seems to suggest that detectives who become so entrenched within a case themselves become as depraved and ugly as the criminals they seek or the corrupt cops they aim to bust. It’s hard to tell with how unevenly lit every scene is which looks like the world is in a constant state of a cloudy morning. Light bursts through every room if only to bring some sunlight into livening up scenes were Carrey stares off aimlessly into his case. He sleepwalks through so much of this movie that by the time we get to the moment where he loses his sense of justice, it comes as a shock. And not in a good way. Watching Carrey go from sleepy detective to aggressive rapist is not exactly a smooth transition, nor is it a comfortable one.

Yet the film never feels all that engaging for the topics it brings up and then loses sight of in its bland stroll from gray room to gray hallway. There’s a questioning of justice but because the film spends so little time touching on this subject the corruption angle can only suffice a blunt exposition to make itself clear. Carrey’s wife in the picture is a Christian who can’t stand his transformation but so little of whatever her values are for the man she married is hidden behind a drab collective of blank looks and mostly empty rooms.

Dark Crimes exists in a void of nothing. While it’s certainly horrific to watch Carrey beat and rape a prostitute, it’s also a real snooze to watch him try to stay awake in scenes that all look like they were shot in the early morning. And so the film presents the two most uncomfortable aspects of a bad movie within the same film; the boring and vulgar. The only thing to wake one up from the dreary are the louder moments of Carrey molesting a woman. And you’ll wish you could go back to sleep at that point.