Solace

 SOLACE

Director : Alfonso Poyart

Year : 2015

Genre : Thriller

Rating : **

The venerable Anthony Hopkins dons a ridiculous mullet in Alfonso Poyart's equally ridiculous crime thriller 'Solace' - an impossibly hammy yet undeniably fun mash up of 'The Silence Of The Lambs' and 'The Dead Zone' that lacks any thrills or spills but certainly makes up for them in spades with grisly murders and inadvertently comedic montages. In this beyond schlocky farce, Hopkins plays Dr. John Clancy, a retired psychic physician who is enlisted by FBI agent Joe Merriweather (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to help uncover the gruesome truth behind a series of orchestrated and seemingly related homicides. Screenwriter Peter Morgan (who rejigged the script from a screenplay originally devised to be a potential sequel to David Fincher's 1995 macabre masterpiece 'Se7en') piles on the cheesy monologues and overbearing exposition with gay abandon while the visually inventive Poyart makes the most of the tenuous 'Se7en' link with Fincher-inflected cinematography and brutal yet completely unaffecting scenes of murder and death. However, the consistently over the top tone of the film as well as the cliche ridden script detracts from any sense of threat and danger whatsoever - despite the best efforts of the immensely talented cast and crew who really do try to pile the edge and darkness to no avail.