Producers: Carissa Buffel, Kevin Matusow, Gia Walsh and Kara Baker Director: Matthew Gentile Screenplay: Matthew Gentile Cast: Tom Pelphrey, Ryan Phillippe, Idina Menzel, Paul Schneider, Shantel VanSanten, Moises Arias, Asher James, Dayne Xavier Fox, Ryan Bingham, Adrian Perez, Chris Harvey, Kevin Corrigan and Jacki Weaver Distributor: Saban Films
Grade: D+
Just because a story is based on true events doesn’t mean that it’s worth telling on screen, or watching if it is. “American Murderer” is about the FBI’s dogged pursuit of Jason Derek Brown, a con-man who was put on its most-wanted list after he killed an armored car security officer in a 2004 robbery. The salient point made in Matthew Gentile’s unexciting, chronologically messy account of his criminal career is that his brother and sister aided him along the way out of a misplaced sense of familial obligation (though his mother finally cut him off), and that his supposed charisma also led others to help him avoid capture.
Tom Pelphrey plays Brown as a scam artist extraordinaire, blessed with a talent for play-acting that can convince just about anybody of his veracity, however implausible the tale he’s spinning. But Pelphrey can’t make him seem truly charming; more often he comes close to being simply obnoxious, so that the people who are taken in by him appear obtuse.
Of course we meet him, in a script by Matthew Gentile so fractured and riddled with flashbacks and flash-forwards that it’s frequently hard to tell where we are chronologically, when he’s already near the end of his rope, closing a deal with a pawn broker (Chris Harvey) for a couple of watches with a fictional sob story just before a bunch of thugs break in to demand he pay the tens of thousands he owes their boss. One of the many flashbacks show him as a boy (Dayne Xavier Fox), along with his sister Jamie (Ryan Bingham) and brother David (Adrian Fox), in a Vegas hotel room with their scalawag father (Kevin Corrigan), who is keeping them from their mother. The suggestion is that his twisted personality can be traced to a troubled childhood.
But now that he’s turned into a noxious ne’er-do-well, his siblings are always trying to help him out, Jamie (Shantel VanSanten) simply because he’s family, and David (Paul Schneider) because he feels guilty for letting Jason take the rap for them both when they shop-lifted some gold clubs. By contrast when he visits his mother Jeanne (Jacki Weaver) in an effort to coax money out of her, she sees through his BS immediately and tosses him out. Naturally at that point his effusive smile turns into a snarl.
In another plot thread, he charms—and beds—a single mom, Melanie Baker (Idina Menzel), a real estate agent from whom he rents a house, while also winning over her young son (Asher James) with his large collection of violent video games. Melanie stands by him through thick and thin, even after FBI Agent Lance Leising (Ryan Phillippe) assures her that Jason’s a fraud who’s been using her.
Leising’s the investigator charged with leading the team tracking Brown down after the senseless murder of the security guard, a crime he’s shown committing with brutal nonchalance. Phillippe plays him with a degree of impassive stolidity hat’s presumably intended as a contrast to Pelphrey’s lack of restraint, but the performance is simply dull.
One can imagine Brown’s story being told in an exciting, incisive way, but Gentile’s version is flatfooted, the screenplay messily constructed and the direction pedestrian. (One groans when, about midway through, he inserts a montage of excerpts from earlier scenes, repeated as though the lines were nuggets of literary gold.) Most importantly, he fails to provide any real insight into what made Brown tick. One can explain that as the result of the fact that it’s never been possible to question him about his motivation, since he’s never been caught—which ends the picture on a note that strives for, but fails to achieve, a sense of mysterious ambiguity. But the other characters never go beyond sketchiness either, so the actors playing them struggle to make them credible. Only Weaver holds the screen with much authority, though Moises Arias makes the most of his scenes as a scuzzy friend of Brown’s who’s forced to aid Leising in his search.
The movie’s reasonably well-made from the technical perspective; Megan Elizabeth Bell’s production design is okay, though not terribly evocative of place or period, and Kalilah Robinson’s cinematography is adequate. But the editing by Matt Allen and Christopher Young can’t paper over the lurches in Gentile’s screenplay, and the score by Scott Gentile is no more than passable.
The result is one of the more tedious and inconsequential of the true crime dramas that are all the rage nowadays.