Dan M
Reviewer

      Sean Penn once said that “if you put three thoughts into a movie, then you’ve broken the law and no one will come.” What happens, however, when no thought is put into a film? Nary a single thought. What happens then? Only a few films have the distinction of being labeled completely worthless. “Twisted” has now joined those ranks.
 
     The premise is so simplistic, so mind numbing, that those who actually go to this film will find no surprises. Ashley Judd plays Inspector Shepard of the San Francisco Police Department. (What happened to the days when San Fran was the home of Dirty Harry Callahan?) Dark secrets from her past have shaped who she has become today. Her father was a serial killer who murdered her mother and then killed himself. She was raised by the now commissioner of police, played by an unusually calm Samuel L. Jackson. After being promoted to Homicide and given a new partner, an unusually overactive Andy Garcia, she finds out her past one-night-stands are being killed one-by-one.
 
     The opening shots are the single redeeming quality. It’s a montage of a fogged-in San Francisco that slowly spirals into a warehouse to show sweat running down the side of a woman’s face. The camera pulls back to reveal a knife to her throat. The woman fights back, but not before uttering some stupid one-liner. After that, it all goes down hill. Sadly, those opening shots, the entire minute and a half it lasted, really left a glimmer of hope to a film that already looked about as exciting as, well, name a cliché.
 
     Remember Ashley Judd? She showed so much promise in “Simon Birch”. Then she met Morgan Freeman and she seemed to just want to repeat the same roles over and over again. (The producers probably needed a younger version of Freeman, and got Jackson instead.) What makes this movie so insulting isn’t the fact that Judd is playing a very similar role again, but that the significant lack of any logic in the film prevents any of the actors from even attempting to trudge through this muddled mess.
 
     Even Samuel L. Jackson and Andy Garcia seem extremely out of place. Jackson never yells once and Garcia does. If anyone has ever seen any of these two actors’ movies, it’s obvious the roles are reversed. Garcia has raised his voice in maybe one film. Jackson raises his voice in every film. Philip Kaufman, the director, makes the film seem as if he didn’t care. Take a look at his other projects (“The Right Stuff”, “Quills”) and it’s evident something just wasn’t connecting. It’s sad to see such a talented director and cast waste their time on such crap.
 
     This film fails for a plethora of reasons, but the main one is logic. The police have to be either the dumbest, or the most masochistic group of people in the world. Take this as an example: Judd reveals she had slept with the first victim, yet she remains the lead detective on the case. In reality, she’d be considered a prime suspect, and her presence during the investigation would compromise everything.
 
     One thing is for certain about “Twisted”: its faults are magnified by the fame of the cast and crew. If this had been an independent film, circulated through Sunset or Toronto film festivals, the inevitable notoriety it will gain for being “the worst film of the century” would certainly not be there. Looking across the screen for a final time, only two words come to mind: it sucked.