Susan Granger’s review of “I Know Who Killed Me” (Sony/Tri-Star Pictures)
It’s impossible to separate gossip from film criticism when a talented young star like Lindsay Lohan sabotages her promising career not only with highly publicized substance abuse but also by choosing to make a morbid, unmitigated on-screen disaster like this.
Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) is an aspiring writer and gifted pianist who inexplicably vanishes on a date with her boyfriend, the New Salem quarterback, Jerrod Pointer (Brian Geragthy), and a couple of girlfriends, leaving her worried parents (Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough) thoroughly bewildered.
Weeks later, she turns up, blood-soaked, on the side of a country road, minus a hand and parts of a leg after escaping from captivity by a sadistic madman. Her amputations seem to match others maimed by a certain serial killer who has been targeted by the area police and FBI agents. But she can’t remember anything and insists she’s Dakota Moss, a tough-talking, pole-dancing stripper – or could she be Aubrey’s long-lost twin sister since they share the same DNA?
While indie director Chris Silverton (“The Lost”) demonstrates a modicum of visual style, despite several grotesquely ludicrous and violent torture sequences, his effort and John R. Leonetti’s hi-def cinematography are totally torpedoed by newbie scripter Jeffrey Hammond’s exploitive, incomprehensible plot and Joel McNeely’s deafening score.
But what’s most tragic is the willful self-destruction of Lindsay Lohan, the once-promising Disney moppet from “The Parent Trap,” who, more recently, delivered memorable coming-of-age performances in “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Bobby.” In one scene, she actually looks so haggard that it’s difficult to believe she just turned 21 years old. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “I Know Who Killed Me” is barely a trashy, incompetent 1 – as in one of the worst movies of the year.
