With no originality at all and plenty of bad things in its core, "The Alphabet Killer" comes to ruin what could be a good story about the real events surrounding the alphabet killer, a psychopath that kidnapped and killed several girls whose initial letters were the same and he never got caught by the police.
Eliza Dushku plays an detective working on the case, trying to discover who this guy is and trying to recover her own sanity after seeing strange hallucinations and visions of the victims while investigating the case. She gets some help from Timothy Hutton's character, a paraplegic psychologist and from another detective; and doesn't get along with her ex-boyfriend (Cary Elwes) who also covers the case.
So, the movie is more about her traumatic and ridiculous moments than to save lives or catch a killer. The director and writers didn't know how to built a suspense and sustain a mystery, everything is so slow and they didn't know how to scare the audience (although the final revelation of who the killer was is so predictable that you might laugh or say that is unbelievably bad). It's not just that that ruins the film, it is also the twisted moments that Dushku has and we're forced to watch being the worst the scene where she escapes from the hospital where she was held, breaking the arm of a nurse even though she already dominated him, and he couldn't do anything with her. That scene is pathetic, also the scenes with her delusions and the "music in her ears" in the church scene.
"The Alphabet Killer" is filled with bad acting, a story with no involvement, no thrill, nothing. Dushku and Elwes are terrible, what a bomb! What happened to Elwes eyebrow? He looked like a old female witch; and Dushku had the guts to produce something like this. The surprising good acting in this thing comes from Melissa Leo and Martin Donovan playing the parents of the Walsh girl, one of the victims; Jack McGee has some good moments and Timothy Hutton is there for reasons of embarrassment and those things can happen with a previous Oscar winner.
Movies inspired in real events usually are good and I enjoy it, but this one is a almost supernatural dramatic flick who has nothing good in it, a waste of time. Pathetic! 2/10
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