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No saving grace
[Photo: Lion’s Gate Films]
Bill Paxton plays a man who makes it his mission to slay demons posing as humans in Frailty. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 11, 2002
In actor-director Bill Paxton's revoltingly twisted Frailty, a psychopath uses religion as an excuse for his grisly mission.
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Frailty is a repellent movie experience, a throwback to slasher-schlock films of the 1960s featuring Joan Crawford or some other washed-up star swinging an ax at unsuspecting noggins. But since this is 2002, director Bill Paxton doesn't need to adhere to any boundaries of good taste, turning Christianity into a psychopath's alibi and his children into accomplices.
Victims are butchered and the audience gets bludgeoned by disturbing images and unsavory themes. Frailty may be a movie that works too well for its own good, moving beyond grisly entertainment into something resembling the venting of a sick, talented mind. Maybe this is therapy for Paxton. Perhaps he needs some.
The movie opens on a dark and stormy night when Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) visits an FBI agent (Powers Boothe) tracking a serial killer identifying himself as "God's Hands." Fenton insists the murderer is his brother Adam, who recently committed suicide. Fenton can't live with what he knows, so he's here to tell the whole sordid story in flashbacks.
Frailty shifts to the early 1960s when Fenton and Adam's unnamed father (Paxton) worked as an auto mechanic to support his two sons. Their mother is dead, taken by God according to the father, who has a vision of an angel assigning him the Lord's work. He'll find three sacred weapons and a list of demons posing as humans to be slain. Dad kidnaps his victims, brings them home and forces the boys to watch as he carries out his duty.
Of course, the sacred weapons are common tools like an ax and a lead pipe to knock the victims unconscious. There isn't any doubt that the father is crazy, so later hints of genuine divine guidance seem like grasping at straws. Frailty shifts between abrupt personality changes and McConaughey's monotone memories, interrupted by death scenes that Paxton the director appears to enjoy a little too much for comfort. The violence in this movie isn't exhilarating or cathartic; it's so brutally methodical that Frailty plays like a snuff film.
Carnage can be perversely entertaining, but Paxton and screenwriter Brent Hanley continually strip Frailty of that possibility. Dad's religious fervor while he kills is offensive to anyone tired of seeing true believers cast as maniacs. If one scene showing the father at odds with sane Christians had been included, Frailty might achieve the balance it needs. Paxton looks at the saintly and sees only evil.
But even that could be excused if children weren't directly involved. Fenton and Adam (played well in flashbacks by Matthew O'Leary and Jeremy Sumpter, respectively) can't complain about Dad's murders because that would mean they're demons, too. When Fenton flinches, Dad locks him in the cellar for days with the barest essentials until he has a religious vision. The emotional abuse in Frailty isn't revealing; it's bordering on obscene.
Paxton does manage some creepy sequences, or is that just our flesh crawling? Hanley's script dotes on irrational terror so long that a late rush of revelations and identity switches is confusing when the drama should finally make sense. The movie can make anyone with a conscience ill, then irritated. Frailty will find some supporters, but nobody that you'd want to sit near in a dark theater.
Frailty
- Grade: D
- Director: Bill Paxton
- Cast: Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe, Matthew O'Leary, Jeremy Sumpter
- Screenplay: Brent Hanley
- Rating: R; violence, child endangerment, profanity
- Running time: 100 min.
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