Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Kiss the Girls Blu-ray Movie Review

Silence of the Cross

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 15, 2015

On CBS's long-running detective series, Castle, the titular author played by Nathan Fillion is often compared, usually unfavorably, to crime novelist James Patterson, who sells more books than Steven King, John Grisham or Dan Brown. Castle is his own most colorful creation, but Patterson's best-known character is criminal psychologist Alex Cross, who has worked, at various times, for the D.C. Metro Police, the FBI and the private sector. Cross has now appeared in three feature films and been played by two different actors. The most memorable were 1997's Kiss the Girls and 2001's Along Came a Spider, both of which featured Morgan Freeman in the role. Both films are being released on Blu-ray by Paramount and distributed by Warner under the studios' three-year licensing deal. Like Paramount's other catalog titles being given a U.S. Blu-ray release in October 2015, the discs appear to be identical to those previously issued overseas some two years earlier.

A prologue involving a tense standoff between the police and an armed citizen introduces us to the skills of Alex Cross (Freeman) as a soft-spoken negotiator who remains cool in a crisis. That self-discipline will shortly be challenged when Cross receives word from his cousin on the force (Bill Nunn) that his niece, Naomi (Gina Ravera), has disappeared from the law school at the University of North Carolina. Cross immediately flies to Durham, NC, where he discovers that the local police consider Naomi to be the latest victim of a serial rapist and murderer who calls himself "Casanova". Just as Cross arrives, another body is found in the woods.

Although Cross is a noted author on criminal psychology, the local police chief, Hatfield (Brian Cox), is less than welcoming. His assistants, Detectives Ruskin and Sikes (Cary Elwes and Alex McArthur), are somewhat more cordial, but it's the FBI that guarantees Cross real access, courtesy of an old friend, Agent Kyle Craig (Jay O. Sanders). Reviewing the victim profiles and limited evidence to date, and interviewing Naomi's angry and defensive boyfriend (Richard T. Jones), Cross struggles to treat the case objectively.

Meanwhile, "Casanova" is choosing his next victim: Dr. Kate McTiernan (Ashley Judd), a surgical intern at a local hospital. The camera follows Kate through her day with the same precision as Casanova probably does when surveilling his victims' routine, right through to her abduction from home and her dizzy awakening in the subterranean cavern where she has been imprisoned. She eventually discovers, to her horror, that other women are being held captive there as well.

It is not a spoiler to reveal that Kate escapes from Casanova, because her flight is an essential element of the story. As much a product of luck and desperation as of survival skills, her escape leaves her half-dead, but she is rescued in the wilderness suffering from exposure, memory loss and mysterious symptoms that are initially mistaken for PTSD. As part of her recovery, Kate insists on working with Cross, which is where the film's real detective story begins.

Paramount was widely (and justly) criticized at the time of the film's release for a distributing a trailer that essentially gave away the second half of the plot. I will not make the same mistake here, except to say that clues lead Cross and Kate across the country to Los Angeles, then back again to Durham and ultimately into poorly mapped areas of the local woods. Screenwriter David Klass (Desperate Measures) has somewhat streamlined Patterson's original plot while retaining its core, which depends on the Thomas Harris strategy of positing a villain whose normal exterior masks an extravagant inner life of fantasy built on sex, suffering and death and who just can't wait to get you locked away somewhere so that he can drag you, kicking and screaming, into his lunacy.

To the credit of director Gary Fleder (Runaway Jury), the villain's indulgences occur almost entirely off-camera, so that they work by suggestion rather than being thrust into the audience's face. What distinguishes Kiss the Girls is not its plot, but its performances: the commanding ease with which Freeman's Alex Cross inserts himself into the investigation, the shaky determination with which Judd's Kate McTiernan addresses a press conference after her escape, then later breaks down in private from survivor's guilt. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, several cuts above the usual in thrillers of this sort, with Cox, Sanders, Elwes, Jones and Nunn all blending in smoothly as an ensemble, plus equally fine work from Tony Goldwyn and a pre-Entourage Jeremy Piven in the L.A. scenes.

Kiss the Girls Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kiss the Girls was shot by Aaron Schneider, who would go on to direct Robert Duvall in the independent feature, Get Low. The vintage of the transfer used for Paramount's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is unknown, but it is at least several years old. Nevertheless, the presentation of the widescreen anamorphic photography is quite good. The image is detailed without obvious indication of intrusive digital manipulation. It is also sharp, within the limited focal range of anamorphic lenses, which have a shallower depth of field than spherical lenses, so that much of the frame may be out of focus. (A single split-diopter shot occurs near the film's end in order to keep two characters in focus at different distances from the camera.) Kiss the Girls preceded the advent of digital post-processing, which introduced the now-familiar high-contrast look that causes so many viewers to downgrade a Blu-ray's video quality when that look is absent. In fact, this is a reasonably faithful presentation of a film-originated project completed photochemically.

The blacks of night scenes are solid and deep, and colors are richly saturated so that the many scenes in the forests surrounding Durham are darkly green in a manner that is almost menacing. As is often the case in popcorn entertainment, everyone dresses too well and looks too good to be real, and the film's cinematography was obviously designed to complement that style. The Blu-ray delivers it accurately.

Paramount has mastered this Warner-distributed disc with an average bitrate of 33.98 Mbps, which is certainly enough bandwidth, and the compression appears to have been capably performed.

Kiss the Girls Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kiss the Girls's original 5.1 soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it has some impressive set pieces, notably the extended sequence of Kate's escape, which fully engages the surround array to convey her sense of disorientation and panic. Her abduction also uses sound creatively for suspense, as noises from all directions in her home leave both Kate and the viewer uncertain of where an intrusion is occurring. Several scenes in L.A., which can't be described without spoilers, also provide memorable sound cues. Dialogue is always clear, and so is its placement, including the disembodied voice of Casanova, who remains off-camera until the very end. Mark Isham (42 (The Jackie Robinson Story)) provided the thriller score.

Kiss the Girls Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras. Paramount's 1998 DVD contained the initial theatrical trailer (the one that didn't gave away most of the plot).

Kiss the Girls Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd had such effective screen chemistry, and Freeman so enjoyed the experience of working with the actress, that they reunited in 2002 for High Crimes, in which both actors played very different characters in a potentially (but only potentially) more interesting dramatic situation that the plot failed to develop credibly. In this film as in that one, Freeman and Judd remain the two best things on the screen. Paramount's Blu-ray is a satisfactory presentation and is recommended for fans of the film.