A thriller inspired by true events lacks inspiration and thrills

Courtesy of Lionsgate

A series of real-life murders results in mediocre pulp fiction in Asif Akbar’s exploitative take on the West Mesa murders.

You might expect a movie that begins with Mel Gibson announcing, “The Bible says we should rejoice in our sufferings” to be a little nobler than “Boneyard.” But this trashy dive into a fictionalized version of the “West Mesa Murders” — a series of unsolved crimes in the American southwest at the turn of this century — is the kind of dubiously sanctimonious exploitation exercise that makes pass “Sound of Freedom” off as a lofty class act in comparison.

Likewise, “inspired by real events”, Asif Akbar’s film alternates between a sordid thriller about a serial killer, not very far from the retro style of “MaXXXine”, and a convoluted procedure involving more or less corrupt investigators and conflicting. Four screenwriters are credited, for results that look a lot like four screenplays mashed together to form a clunky narrative deck of cards – from which the great Gibson name was drawn heavily. Too cluttered to be boring, but often clunky and inept, this weak would-be thriller won’t make nearly the noise that “Sound of Freedom” managed to make. Lionsgate will release it on demand on July 2 and in select theaters on July 5.

The bodies of 11 women, ages 15 to 32, were found in a creek outside Albuquerque in 2009 after a resident walking her dog found a human bone and alerted authorities. When the remains were identified, the victims were found to be mostly Hispanic sex workers buried four to eight years earlier. While police interviewed several suspects, none were ever charged or definitively linked to the case — though the killings appeared to stop after one of the men was shot and killed in 2006.

Here, a similar discovery prompts police chief Carter (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) to assign homicide detectives Young (Nora Zehetner) and Ortega (Brian Van Holt) as lead investigators. But they’re also joined by outside help in the form of Officer Petrovick, another in Gibson’s long line of drunken derelicts who nonetheless have more sleuth instincts on the job than all the others combined. He announces that the elusive criminal is most likely a 30-something Latino “mission killer,” explaining, “He thinks he’s making the world a better place by getting rid of all the people who make it sin.”

César (Weston Cage Coppola), a portly and solitary man with glasses, hovers worryingly around several young women, “professional” or not. But suspicion also falls on Officer Tate (Michael Sirow), known as “the crookedest cop on patrol,” who had questionable dealings with almost all of the deceased victims – as well as drug cartels. , human traffickers, etc.

Most of the time, he stays on the fringes of the story — even if he frequently spouts philosophical nuggets in voiceover — but Petrovick tries to refocus by telling us: “This matter was… personal. » He had lost his daughter in a shooting a few years earlier. But this is the kind of cliché-riddled business where it’s “personal” for everyonebecause almost every major character has a similarly contrived backstory of tragic loss. The plot’s mix of subplots, flashbacks, and digressions has little structural integrity. It seems more focused on giving each major actor a big crying scene or violent hysteria – even though their role is so brief, they get virtually nothing else.

The prolific writer-director-producer Akbar, whose name has been associated with a score of little-known films in recent years, doesn’t show much ability to handle actors. The cast is left to its own devices, with very uneven results. Gibson, co-writer-producer Vincent E. McDaniel (as Tate’s narcotics superior) and several others retain a degree of dignity and credibility. The team of Zehetner and Van Holt is hampered by mediocre writing, while those playing the villains are given far too much freedom to give their all. A few of the cast members seem downright awkward – perhaps the most conspicuous and disconcerting of them all being Jackson, who has done far too much screen work in the 20 years since “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” to excuse such a stilted turn.

While the film is enjoyable to watch thanks to Joshua Reis’s cinematography and RJ Cooper’s editorial pacing, “Boneyard” lacks momentum, tension and atmosphere. It has the rough texture of a TV procedural, with a shaky, faux-urgent camera. The menacing percussion thumps of Andrew Morgan Smith’s soundtrack only serve to underscore these shortcomings.

It’s perhaps a blessing that there are relatively few actual murder scenes, since Akbar mostly shows women riding in strangers’ cars right up to the killer’s grave-digging shovel. But while the actresses playing prostitutes and other prey here generally manage to lend some sympathy to their roles, the film lacks the expertise to really generate a sense of mortal peril. It ends with a dedication “to the victims of the West Mesa murders,” but leaves you with the tainted feeling that these unfortunate young women have simply been mistreated all over again, by a B-movie that doesn’t even do them the favor of being good.