(Movies fail at the box office, and many more fail to even find release into theaters. When one of these dead on arrival titles arrives on disc they go under the knife of the forensic video-examiner, all in the hope of determining the causes of death in the marketplace. Be forewarned any who wish to see the film – this piece is entirely a SPOILER.)
A title with a number of valued credentials (a Warners picture, made by Joel Silver’s Dark Castle production company and starring John Cusack) this police mystery arrives as itself a complete mystery.
The Factory has spent a serious amount of time in the studio vault – it was shot in 2008! Now it emerges, with the barest of announcement. One possible problem is this was written and directed by Morgan O’Neil, only the second movie for the onetime winner of the Australian version of
Project Greenlight. Another is anonymity.
Cusack teams with Jennifer Carpenter (
Dexter), on the trail of a serial kidnapper (
Walking Dead’s Dallas Roberts) haunting the seedy streets of Buffalo in the middle of winter; Jim Kelly fans needn’t study the background too closely as this was filmed in Montreal. The setting is drab, the acting is scattershot, and Cusack plays his role in alternating waves of either annoyance or apathy; you would not be faulted for describing his performance as “hungover”. So, should you care about a long unsolved case of missing prostitutes without bodies, taking place in the dead of winter? Let’s carve into this long-dead corpse and find out.
00:00:37 Diluted Tableau We ride around with the ostensible criminal as he trolls the streetwalkers of Buffalo. For reasons never explained we are shown that he uses a pine tree air freshener, like approximately 20,000,000 other potential suspects.
00:03:15 Septic Introduction Our villain – named Gary – has brought home his entertainment selection for the night. But things are about to go sideways as he peers in to see his date standing up to urinate. Unlike the polite reaction to this type of discovery we saw in
The Crying Game, Gary expresses his dismay with a fireplace poker to the midsection, and a kick to the groin.
00:05:08 Arrested Physics In case you weren’t clear on the bad guy yet, he’s the one having a cocktail while watching tv, with a dead tranny hooker speared on the wall.
00:05:46 Invasive Pathos We next meet the cops, Mike Fletcher and Kelsey Walker. They are driving on a snowy night as the news comes out that police are closing the big missing prostitute case they have been working on. He and Kelsey are both workaholics, beaten down by the case and police politics. How much you want to bet they simply drop the case and move on?
00:06:37 Cranial Atrophy Kelsey lectures her partner about taking a break from the case to spend time with the family on Thanksgiving. Then Mike invites her in for a drink but she declines, because she has to do paperwork on the case.
00:10:21 Iatrogenic Direction Morgan O'Neil gives us "Mood Set Piece-101" here as he offers a close-up of Mike carving the turkey with an electric knife, and then a flash-cut to the killer using a mitre saw to carve the dispatched hooker. (Bonus for him tossing a scrap to the dog.)
00:10:57 Plot Stimulant After being clumsily informed Kelsey cannot have kids and is all alone in Buffalo we see her working at home, with a stack of fertility books on her desk. In a film with scenes of captive women used for breeding Kelsey being alone yet focused on fertility seems more than a light point.
00:09:45 Weakened Impulse In short order we learn Mike is a testy, workaholic absentee spouse with a harried wife and problematic high school daughter named Abbey, who hates them and wants to hang out with her college boyfriend because Mike is a part-time father at best. He has a poor attitude and his own partner barely tolerates him. THIS is the guy you are supposed to care about for the length of a film.
00:12:52 Elevated Foreshadow Toxicity Mike speaks with Abby about the missing women, detailing how nobody cares they are gone and in the clutches of a psycho. He says to her, “That’d be a horrible way to live, right?”
00:18:17 Ruptured Visual Gary meets his hospital contact, a hefty nurse/orderly named Darryl, who supplies him with contraband meds. Gary has him blackmailed with a flip-phone video of the orderly “tapping a hooker for free” in a hospital bed. I understand why the city of Buffalo might have resisted this being shot on location.
00:26:37 Diluted Tableau Abby sneaks out to meet her boyfriend at the diner where he works. They fight and she storms off into the night. I think we can pass judgment on the Fletchers as parents at this time, considering their seventeen year old is kidnapped when Gary mistakes her for a prostitute.
00:29:04 Cliché Malignancy A task force storms the home of a prime suspect in the case. This gives us the tired scene of cops refusing to flip on a light switch in a dwelling, instead relying on the visually stylish use of flashlights.
00:31:58 Continuity Failure In his dungeon Gary has Abby chained up with the kidnapped hookers whom he is impregnating, and he places a metal ring on her finger to solder into place, as a symbol of their demented betrothal. We see just how disturbed the guy is, because he does not use welder’s goggles.
00:38:19 Invasive Pathos With Abby missing now Mike’s already obsessive work schedule ramps higher. At the hospital he harasses Darryl for information, beating the witness for answers. This behavior should lead to Mike’s removal from the case and rescuing his daughter.
00:39:14 Chronicle Seizure Mike is removed from the case, and rescuing his daughter.
00:42:54 Ruptured Visual Cusack finally shows some signs of life, in one of those over-the-top scenes of an actor trashing a room.
00:46:01 Commercial Incision While rooting around his daughter’s room Mike finds out that Abby is pregnant. She uses the same brand of home pregnancy test as the kidnapper.
00:47:32 Ruptured Visual Your brand new DVD release becomes dated by a contemporary police headquarters without a single flatscreen monitor.
00:53:28 Cauterized Plot Cavity Mike breaks into the apartment of Darryl in the afternoon and finds the list Gary made for his latest drug order. This proves to be a break in case, but only because it is doubly moronic:
1) Gary wrote this list on the back of a business envelope from his employer.
2) It was later that evening before Mike actually turned the envelope over and discovered the business details printed on the front.
00:56:57 Blunt-Force Dialogue At the hospital the next day Mike waits for more questions on Darryl. As he goes for coffee he encounters Gary working in the cafeteria, who sports a head wound. Asking about the nurse/suspect leads to a number of references to Darryl’s size and eating habits. So not only is this film strongly misogynistic, it is openly hostile to overweight people.
01:05:47 Weakened Impulse Mike hears of a hooker hitting a violent customer in the head with a beer bottle. While interviewing that girl she says the guy smelled of hot dogs and onions. It never occurs to Mike to link this info to the cafeteria guy with a bleeding head wound.
01:19:22 Chronicle Seizure Mike finally puts all the pieces together and is now seeking out Gary, catching up to the audience.
01:28:26 Diluted Tableau While Mike and Kelsey converge on Gary’s home, down in the dungeon Abby needs to perform a C-section on one of the captives. That’s a heady task; her only training has been in cutting class.
01:30:58 Storyline Torsion As Mike and Gary are both shot we get The Big PLOT TWIST! We learn the inevitable detail that Kelsey is involved with Gary and has been shielding him via the investigation all along. Director O’Neil shows us flashbacks of the breadcrumbs he left for us about this reveal (at least ten, by my count). Nice try in rubbing our faces in your cleverness, except we were on the plot point all along.
01:38:46 Collapsed Climax Kelsey is moving into a new home, with a mini-van filled with the infants Gary had been harvesting for her. Somehow they are all the same age, despite stories of many births over the years. Questions like why did Kelsey need all of these kids, how is she legally claiming them from the survivors, and how does she afford such a large home on a salary from Buffalo PD are left swimming in your head. Kelsey's demented look as the camera pushes in almost manages to wash those questions from your mind.
POST MORTEM While not entirely a horrible venture
The Factory instead proves to be lost among so many, and better made, offerings of a similar nature. The standard elements – police procedural, embittered cop, serial killer mystery – have been worn out. Even the grisly and emotional elements seem to pale compared to any given episode of
Criminal Minds. Add to this tepid mixture the ingredients of lackluster acting and contorted plot elements and you end up with a crucially flawed production which failed to distinguish itself.
Stories of films buried for years by studios due to quality issues are commonplace. Here however I feel it might be a case of something else; this film was so unremarkable that once it had been parked it was probably simply forgotten.