I Know Who Killed Me
Lindsay Lohan’s been nailed to the wall every which way this year. It’s not just her seemingly out-of-control partying and self-destructive behavior that have been lamented by the delirious celebrity media, it’s her “poor career choices.” But if it weren’t for the one, the other wouldn’t merit mentioning. Does anyone blame Elisha Cuthbert for starring in “Captivity,” reputedly the most loathsome of 2007’s entries in the torture-porn subgenre? No. Lohan loses out because her offscreen antics have created expectations that her onscreen work can’t live up to. She doesn’t make any worse career choices than any other poorly managed child star-turned-young adult starlet. She’s made two excellent movies in the past three years (”Mean Girls” and “A Prairie Home Companion”) alongside some obvious dogs — a perfectly reasonable batting average.
Point is, if Lindsay Lohan can’t star in an almost campy, vaguely satirical, wannabe arty, fetish-laden torture thriller, who can?
“I Know Who Killed Me” isn’t the worst movie of 2007 by any means. (To these eyes, that honor goes hands-down to “The Number 23.”) And it’s a lot more entertaining than stolid, self-styled “important” movies like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Love in the Time of Cholera” or “Lions for Lambs.” It might have really been a howler if the director, Chris Silvertson, were in on the joke. But he’s too busy designing unnecessarily elaborate camera moves and coming up with inventive uses for the color blue. The screenplay is so intentionally ridiculous that one suspects the writer was trying to satirize the torture-porn trend. It seems to lament that all the convincingly creepy serial killers and shocking plot twists have been done already. Screenwriter Jeff Hammond throws such transparent silliness on the screen that one suspects he’s lamenting what the thriller genre has become. The secret to the plot is revealed, about two-thirds through, in a search on Ask.com. And the killer (SPOILER!) turns out to be a deranged piano teacher who severs the fingers and hands (and legs, for good measure I guess) of students who don’t live up to their potential. If you find all this implausible, the movie leaves plenty of hints that what you’re seeing may all be a dream, or a fantasy; check the Internet for elaborate theories about what’s really happening from viewers who missed the forest for the trees.
Lohan is bad in a pedestrian sort of way; she does her best to make awful dialogue sound naturalistic. Sometimes the lines are beyond redemption, as when she’s forced to lament: “Fingers: gone! Leg: gone! Hand: gone! And now I’m being held prisoner in a hospital!” And when she speaks the five words that make up the title, which are nonsensical even in context, she can’t quite make it a punchline.
Still, there are some amusing moments. The movie leads us to believe that smart, privileged high school student Aubrey (Lohan) is kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer who severs her right hand and her right leg below the knee before she escapes. When she comes to, she insists that she’s not Aubrey but Dakota, a stripper. Aubrey’s parents take Dakota home, where Aubrey’s awkward, sex-crazed football-player boyfriend pays a call. She greets him on crutches, in hot pants, then hobbles upstairs and rides him like a seasoned sex worker, while Aubrey’s mother (Julia Ormond!) listens in horror and scrubs the kitchen counters, because what’s the mom of a maimed and traumatized teen supposed to do?
Later, Dakota recalls in flashback how she was doing her heavily clothed striptease (Lohan’s gyrations have the erotic charge of a soiled sweat sock) and retreated to her dressing room to find out that her middle finger had somehow come off inside her glove. I hate it when that happens!
“I Know Who Killed Me” truly must be seen to be believed. You can’t say that about a lot of movies.