SOLE SURVIVOR (2000)
Pimp that formula, Dean!  Pimp it good!

  There was a while there, around '93 or '94, when for some reason I just couldn't get enough Dean Koontz.  It took about twenty of his books for me to figure out that about twelve of those twenty were exactly the same, I had to get all the way up to that piece of shit Dark Rivers Of The Heart.  After that, I just stopped, only re-visiting the guy's writing a couple of times, finding myself quite disliking it both times.  I'll still defend a number of his books and still love Phantoms very much, but I just don't intend to read anything by anyone who's so deeply buried in so much formula.  I never got around to reading Sole Survivor; c'mon, I've got a hundred thousand pages worth of books in my "to read" pile.  If I had that kind of time, I would've choked up the courage to read Battlefield Earth by now, I could use the yuks.

So I did the next best thing, I watched the miniseries on FOX, and if there's one thing this silly show hammers home, it's that Koontz is STILL whoring out the same book again and again, and boy am I glad I stopped wasting my time.  Sometimes, when somebody flails out exactly the same product every time (like AC/DC), it's cute, aawww, they're not being trendy.  Usually, it's called whoring out a formula.

Billy Zane stars as Joe Carpenter, a guy who's still mourning the death of his wife and daughter in a plane crash a year ago.  So he goes out to visit their grave and catches a lady (Gloria Reuben) taking pictures of the gravestone; he asks what the hell's going on, and she hints that she has big news for him, but then is chased off by some shadowy conspirators.  Soon enough, Carpenter finds himself running for his life, and finds out that this lady was trying to tell him something that will change the world, something about the survival of the soul after death.  (Man, this had better be good, solid proof, because you'd have a hard time changing the world with somebody's belief in an afterlife)

So, yeah, the plot is pretty much the same as any of the following Koontz books that I can remember: Dark Rivers Of The Heart, The Servants Of Twilight, Watchers, Mr. Murder, Twilight Eyes, Lightning...  Man and woman, pursued by shadowy government/corporate/religious/military agency, Uncovering The Truth, making their stand deep in the back woods, blah blah blah.  And there's a whole other stack of his books where instead of the agency, it's just one or two geneti-weirdos (The Bad Place, Whispers, Dragon Tears, and that horrible, excruciatingly bad Shadowfires).  The only difference here is that Carpenter doesn't appear to fall in love with her and have perfect sex with her the first time, and there seems to be less of a reliance on firearms as usual.  But the rest of it is pretty much cookie-cutter Koontz; there's even a truckload of weird, overdone plot points in the second half (laboratory-bred and -raised psychic kids, people who go into insane violent rages, and really what does this soul thing have to do with ANYTHING?).  Does he even know that he's writing the same book again and again?  I don't know which would reflect worse on him, if he does, or if he doesn't.

And it's all done as badly as, maybe worse than you might expect.  Take that scene where the helicopter, tailing Carpenter's car, looms up (and pretty low) in the sky in plain view, probably not wanting to be detected because otherwise, it would have landed or dropped somebody or something.  Somebody teach these morons some tailing skills!  And for God's sake, could it be any more obvious that all these guys are part of a clandestine government/corporate agency when they're headed up by John C. McGinley?

This character, by the way, tries very hard to be "he's scary because he's crazy".  Try to imagine how scary it is when, asked if Carpenter should be killed, he replies something like "Kill him," holds out one hand, "Not kill him," holds out the other, and proceeds to pretend to juggle while singing a little clown song.  Has there ever been an effective character which was soooo wacky that he's scary?  Ever?  Didn't think so.  I kinda like McGinley as an actor, he has a fun time making you love to hate him, but here he completely misses the mark.  Even when he's doing stuff that's waaaaaaay out there in terms of villainy (torturing innocents, blinding horses), it's hard to ignore the fact that he's evil just because Koontz is either unable or unwilling to write a villain we might dare to sympathize with or even just pity.  He explains his motivation in one brief exchange at the end, but it falls flat and really explains nothing.

Longtime cinematographer-turned-director Mikael Solomon doesn't do much to help; the first half of this thing features a LOT of scenes where the camera shows us text on a computer screen, and I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at.  Heavy-handed symbolism (Ooh!  The kite crashed!) abounds.  And the VERY frequent flashbacks to the plane crash, kind of effective at first, ultimately become hilariously unconvincing.

I might've been able to get past all this if the story here weren't so...so Koontz.  This story actually contends that if you look at a picture of your loved ones' gravestone and REALLY open your heart, you'll...guess what.  Yeah, I know my heart gets that far open after some really good peyote.  Koontz seems to have taken it upon himself to be like the Robin Williams of genre fiction; it isn't enough to entertain anymore, now he has to...to heal, to make the world a better place. (hint: any writing that's good makes the world a better place anyway.)  I do believe I'm going to barf.  Koontz served as co-executive producer on this one, so I'm guessing it doesn't stray very far from the book at all, but I'm willing to bet that there was a lot of heavy-handed moralizing (again, a Koontz trademark, made easy by his impossibly noble heroes and ludicrously evil villains) that didn't get as far as the screen.

Hey, maybe if you've never read anything by Koontz before, you'll see past its flaws and get a kick out of this.  Maybe.  But it's four hours long, three without commercials.  Save yourself.

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