Every so often, a movie comes along that merits the Billy Madison dismissal: “What you’ve just said was one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
With that in mind, may I introduce you to Rowdy Herrington’s A Murder for Crows? I picked this off Amazon Prime’s line-up because it looked like the kind of thriller that would have seen its best, truest destiny as a cable rerun, and I have a soft spot for that kind of thing. It also had an intriguing, instantly hooky premise: A man achieves wild success with a plagiarized novel only to find that the novel depicts real-life murders with details only the killer would know, and now the police have some questions for him.
It’s a great premise, and the film’s first blunder is taking roughly a hundred years to get to it. Our eventual plagiarist is Lawson Russell (Cuba Gooding Jr., way too milquetoast here), but at the start of the film, he’s a successful defense attorney having a major crisis of conscience. You see, one of his clients is, gasp, guilty. “How can I continue to defend him?” he asks. “How can you be a lawyer who’s never run into this dilemma before?” I ask. The movie answers only one of us, and it’s not me. When the judge won’t let Russell recuse himself, Russell accosts his client on the stand and badgers him about how guilty he is.
This tanks Russell’s career, as it fucking should, and Russell proceeds to move to Key West, where he lies around on a boat all day, occasionally takes people out fishing, and tells people he’s totally going to write a novel one of these days. (Movie, if I wanted to watch someone procrastinate on writing a book, I could just look in the mirror.) One of his fishing trip clients is Christopher Marlowe, who will also immediately provoke several questions, like: “Is that guy just wearing a lot of old age makeup?” and “Does Russell not know of the other, much more famous Christopher Marlowe?” Yes, he is, and no, he doesn’t. He also blanks on Goethe and reacts to Shakespeare’s “let’s kill all the lawyers” line as though he’s hearing it for the first time. Actually, Russell reacts to everything as though he’s hearing it for the first time. Truly, this man encounters the world with childlike wonder.
Marlowe gives Russell a copy of his own manuscript, A Murder of Crows. Russell, having had a book foisted on him by an old man he just met, somehow doesn’t just shove the thing in a drawer and devote the rest of his life to avoiding this guy. Instead, he devours it, because it turns out the book–a dark literary thriller about a killer targeting lawyers–is a masterpiece, a work of sheer genius. When Marlowe dies of a heart attack, Russell steals the book and sells it as his own. This doesn’t feel like a major crisis of conscience borne of desperation, like you’d think it would for a man with the moral rectitude to be shocked, shocked to learn he was, you know, a lawyer. Instead, he just kind of does it. It has no moral stakes. It has no anything.
As we suffer through a needlessly circuitous plot, we gradually learn that Russell was the victim of a bizarrely complex plot that required a preexisting serial killer to write a guaranteed bestseller about his crimes, disguise himself to track Russell down, fake his new identity’s death, wait to see if Russell would steal the book, wait for Russell to publish it to acclaim and financial success (publication is not a speedy process!), attend an autograph signing in disguise to get Russell to sign the book for a detective, mail the book to a detective, ????, PROFIT. The company in David Fincher’s The Game did less work than this. The biggest twist in this film is finding out that the guy responsible for all this somehow did it all while working full-time. Now that’s a side-hustle. Bet you all feel pretty lazy right now!
Almost everything in A Murder of Crows is both bad and inexplicable. (Credit where credit is due: very occasionally, a good line or a tiny element of entertainment will slip past the gate. The best example is the very noir moment of Tom Berenger’s world-weary detective refusing a drink by saying, “Never touch it. Makes me happy.”) A pierced nipple is treated as a shocking reveal, and a sex scene is staged like a jump scare. A woman is willing to defend Russell against murder charges but storms away in disgust when he admits to having plagiarized. Russell’s publisher accepts his manuscript by inviting him to the publishing house, where they’ve gathered the whole team of editors in for a party in his honor. At one point, Russell finds all the disguises he’s seen in the movie neatly arranged in a row, and he dutifully stares at each one to trigger the relevant flashback. There’s exactly one (1) moment when the film has enough guts to make a bold, surprising-but-not-stupid choice, and it immediately undoes it a minute later and has the gall to basically leave the resolution off-screen.
May God have mercy on this movie’s soul.