Twisted once again welcomes you to the wonderful world of weak would-be thrillers. It's seems like the last few years have produced quite a few of them (Kiss the Girls, Basic, Double Jeopardy etc.) And what's most surprising, is the talent these disposable mysteries attract. I just don't get it.

In Twisted, Ashley Judd plays San Francisco police officer Jessica Shepard. She's just been promoted and has the respect of most of her peers, but that respect soon turns to suspicion as men that she's had liaisons with, start dropping like flies.

Not surprisingly, everyone in this picture is a suspect, even officer Shepard herself who begins to doubt her own sanity thanks to a series of unexplained blackouts. (Seriously, enough with the unexplained blackouts.)

I can always tell when one of these twisty plot driven movies is going to be lousy. A good mystery grabs you and doesn't let go. You're so into it that you aren't trying to figure it out. Things just happen, and you enjoy it. In a lousy mystery, I find myself constantly heckling what's going on up there on screen. I'm trying to figure out who the killer is because the proceedings are so damned dull, I have nothing better to do. Such is the case with the boring and all too predictable Twisted, a movie in which myself and the rest of the audience had the killer pegged in the first fifteen minutes.

It's bad enough that the film is devoid of tension, but it's also riddled with nearly every cop film cliché you can shake a nightstick at. Twisted suggests that after a hard day's night, virtually the entire police department meet at the local bar and drink the night away as they air their various grievances. And, of course, our fearless heroine officer Shepard is a drunk with a dark, tragic past that haunts her so much that she sees a shrink (played by the always dependable David Strathairn. And finally, we have Samuel L. Jackson's Detective John Mills, an old school veteran who used to be partners with Shepard's dad back in the day. And out of the kindness of his heart, he takes his old partner's daughter under his wing. No doubt, all this stuff sounds painfully familiar, and it should because similar such scenarios have appeared in dozens of other films.Which would be fine if Twisted built any kind of momentum or offered up any surprises. Negative.

Ashey Judd has played a variation of this character around five times now. The only difference here is that she plays the part a little more masculine and a lot more dysfunctional. While she does have a movie star look, I didn't buy her character for a second in this movie. This is just a very inconsistent performance, and one sequence in particular (in which she has a sort of emotional breakdown), I found myself laughing. Andy Garcia is a charismatic actor but his thankless role as Detective Mike DeMarco is never given a chance to develop. He's just sort of there to look suspicious just like every other guys in the movie. This includes the wildly entertaining Samuel L. Jackson who appears bored throughout most of the film.

Of all the bashing I've bestowed upon Twisted, the most disheartening fact is that this film was directed by the brilliant Philip Kaufman (who's directing credits include The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and, of all things, a co-screenwriting credit on Raiders of the Lost Ark). I just can't understand why he took-on this project. Perhaps it was simply for a paycheck, or maybe he had to make this to get a real project off the ground. Hell, other film makers have done that very thing (it was reported that Barry Levinson only took the dreadful Sphere on so that he could do Wag the Dog). I hope that's the case, because Mr. Kaufman is much better than this.

Twisted is a boring, predictable thriller that fails to engage the audience in any shape or form. Like last year's In the Cut, it's a film with an A-list cast and D-level everything else.