’The Watcher’ stars James Spader as a detective who is in search for a serial killer, played by Keanu Reeves, who, several years back, murdered his wife. Unable to catch him over the years, he moves to Chicago, sort of to get away from what happened. Suddenly, a few young women are being murdered in the same fashion and the serial killer shows his return by sending photographs of his victims within hours of their deaths to the detective to give him a slight head start to save them.
Most of the reviews for ’The Watcher’ were bad or not very good. This is why I never really let the critics decide for me on which films are good and which ones are bad. I usually disagree with them because a lot of them only focus on a certain part like the actors, not on the film itself. I have to admit this time I almost believed the critics because I heard so many bad things about the making of ’The Watcher’.
After Keanu Reeves signed to this film, which was a favor to his close friend, the director Joe Charbanic, the studio in charge, Universal, changed a lot of things around. Keanu wasn’t happy about it. Even though he was the bad guy in the film and Spader was the good guy, they made him more known in the film due to his huge movie star status, thinking it would bring a lot of hype to it and that’s why Keanu wasn’t happy with it since he already had a tight film schedule. Also because of the script and some other little things and Keanu couldn’t drop out unless if he went to court and he would have had to put up a lot of money to get out of the film, so he stuck with it.
I actually expected this film to stink, but it was sort of better than I thought. It got slow quite a few times, mainly at the beginning though. There were some pretty good, suspenseful scenes and moments. I liked some of the camera work also, giving the film an edgy, dark feel to it.
Keanu, I thought, did a good job as the serial killer. He’s rarely portrayed bad guys in films, so I was surprised of his good performance. I’m used to seeing him as the hero or sweet guy in movies. Spader was also good, but he, along with Keanu, have had better roles.
It was enjoyable overall and some of the music was pretty good. The cast was believable, but it did have some slow and bad moments. The film doesn’t suffer completely though. If you didn’t like this film, you can’t entirely blame Keanu due to the mess he went through during the making of it. A lot of people seem to have hate for him. If one of his films wasn’t good, then they hate the rest of them. Keanu can act in my opinion. He’s not one of the greatest, but he can act and it was fun and interesting to watch him play a serial killer in this film.