Originally published July 28, 2007 at 12:00 AM | Page modified July 28, 2007 at 10:27 AM
Movie review
"I Know Who Killed Me" is Lohan's latest misstep — on screen
Any lingering doubts that Lindsay Lohan's judgment isn't all it should be are answered with "I Know Who Killed Me," forever hereafter known...
The Orlando Sentinel
Movie review 
"I Know Who Killed Me," with Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough. Directed by Chris Sivertson.
104 minutes. Rating: R, for grisly violence including torture and disturbing gory images, and for sexuality, nudity and language.
Any lingering doubts that Lindsay Lohan's judgment isn't all it should be are answered with "I Know Who Killed Me," forever hereafter known as the movie that came out the week her personal life may have hit bottom. It's an unintentionally hilarious disaster, a movie seemingly built on wickedly ironic prescience.
What else would you call a film about a woman who loses a leg and is fitted with a rechargeable one that beeps, a movie starring an actress infamous for wearing (and ignoring) an alcohol detecting anklet?
Lohan isn't at her best playing a mutilated girl who claims she isn't who her friends and family and the cops say she is in this torture-porn fiasco. It's filmed as a lurid dream in 943 shades of blue — although "All Cheerleaders Die" director Chris Sivertson had a lot bigger problems than deciding which blue filter to use in this scene or that one. The script is shockingly tin-eared and inept.
The actress has been hearing this a lot this week, but here it is one more time. Lohan should have known better.
Aubrey, her character, is a talented pianist and writer who fancies herself a novelist, scribbling out the sort of self-obsessed navel-gazing that 18-year-olds have been churning out since English was taught in high school.
"She always felt like half a person," she narrates to the rest of her creative-writing class. "She knew a trick. She knew how to turn her life into a movie."
Really? "She" should've given Jeff Hammond a hand. He's the illiterate hack who scripted this.
Aubrey is snatched after a football game. And weeks later, what's left of her turns up in a ditch. Who did it? The creepy gardener? The wrapped-too-tight dad (Neal McDonough)? The obsessed boyfriend (Brian Geraghty)?
If you don't guess within the first seven minutes of the movie, you plainly need to get out more.
The one-legged survivor claims she isn't Aubrey, that she's a stripper named Dakota Moss. This gives Lohan, all of 21, the chance to play a pole-dancing floozy in endless flashbacks. That, the ersatz mystery and a comically candid sex scene must have sold her on doing this movie. Her last couple of films have been overtly sexual (check out her boating scene in "Georgia Rule"), designed to leave her Disney days far behind.
The bulk of the movie is Dakota trying to convince everyone that she's not a figment of Aubrey's imagination and everybody else trying to convince her otherwise. That includes her mother, played by the unfortunate Julia Ormond, the once-promising star of "Sabrina" who either walked away from a Hollywood career or was pushed.
There's a strange incompetence at work here, in the alterna-pop songs spattering the early episodes, in the death metal that underscores the strip-club scenes. It's as if Sivertson was frightened by "Twin Peaks" as a child and is working out a 7-year-old's understanding of David Lynch-style cryptic darkness in a movie that will almost certainly not be his big break.
Lohan may finally get the personal help she needs after last week's latest run-in with the law. The state of California may see to that.
But that won't cover the professional missteps. This career needs counseling, too. You could go down the credits and say that about most anybody involved with "I Know Who Killed Me." What they don't know could fill up a film, a much better one than this.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
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