Demi Moore’s performance is a quality teeter-totter. Sometimes she is ultra-fun-bad-ass but other times she is blathering boob. Her character is going through a divorce and her “emotional” scenes feel as forced as a raw potato through a colander. She also does that masculine walk that is supposed to tell us she is tough. I would love to see a woman who still walks like a woman and doesn’t have to become a man to be a force to be reckoned with.

Bruce Evans makes some cinematic mistakes. There is a strange use of music and change of style in a few scenes. There is a gun fight and he uses music and style that seems like it is attempting to make it a gunfight – Hackers style. Evan’s attempts at edgy coolness are misplaced in a movie that up until that plot point, not style driven. It is more than a little jarring and moderately confusing.

Except for the scenes where the Evans gets caddywhumpus, the movie is pretty straight-forward looking. The plot moves laterally to the twist ending. Done just a little better, it may have been a fantastic twist but instead it is about as twisty as elbow macaroni. I figured out what the twist was going to be about 20 minutes before it happened.

There is relationship between Brooks and Atwood that is severely undeveloped, to the detriment of the story. I think the writers were attempting a Silence of the Lambs-esque affection for the detective.

Mr. Brooks is a fantastic example of a movie that does not trust the audience. Writers Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon took what might have been a B rated movie and made it a D movie by thinking we are too stupid to get it. The writers walked up to the top of the Empire State Building, opened a window, stuck their head out to see how high it is, and chucked the ending out the window. At maximum velocity, the script, and consequently the movie, is eviscerated on the cinematic cement.

Mr. Brooks is especially frustrating because it was ok, until the ending went kablooey.