In its worst moments, of which it has arguably too many, Boneyard is another one of those movies that seems like it was constructed by putting a lot of generic tropes into a random generator to produce what we’re watching on screen here. In its best moments, of which there are a surprising number, co-writer/director Asif Akbar’s film almost gets at something probing about the futility of justice in the face of abject cruelty and at the whim of the randomness of fate. The production was clearly on the quick and cheap, with various sequences stitched together haphazardly, and the actors include a lot of names that we have seen in such productions before, many of whom likely filmed their parts over a long weekend.
For much of this film’s second half, all that goes out the window, as the story takes some genuine twists and turns on its way to a highly paranoid lack of conclusion. One might think such stolen resolution is a sign of a sequel that Akbar hopes to direct, perhaps with this very same cast. One would be wrong: Indeed, the story here comes from a real-life series of murders, committed between 2001 and 2005 but not discovered until 2009, in a stretch of New Mexico desert called West Mesa, located not far from Albuquerque. The culprit behind these murders has still never been found, which is an undeniably terrifying thought, but this screenplay (by Akbar, Vincent E. McDaniel, Hank Byrd and Koji Steven Sakai) mostly uses it as fodder for a bit of psycho-thriller exploitation.
That’s what is so frustrating about the experience of watching this movie. As we get further into the horrifying details of the story, our impulse to sympathize with those details constantly rubs up against our impulse to cringe at the different ways Akbar chooses to exploit them. On the other end of the spectrum, our desire to respect the idea that the movie takes the story seriously, to whatever degree it does so, is at odds with the cheapness of the production, the broadness of the performances and the general air of pedestrian filmmaking on display. The movie opens with a somber Mel Gibson quoting a Biblical passage about rejoicing in our suffering, and then Gibson’s Petrovick, a federal agent called in to profile the elusive serial killer of women, doesn’t have much to do for the remainder of the movie.
This is one of those instances, hinted at above, of an actor who likely filmed his part quickly and cashed his check quietly, and the same could probably be said for Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who plays the chief of police with an air of disengaged disinterest. The actual stars of the movie are Brian Van Holt and Nora Zehetner as detectives Ortega and Young, on the case for personal reasons that Akbar insists we see in flashback and through broken pieces of expository conversation. That goes for Gibson’s and Jackson’s characters, as well, by the way, and meanwhile, Caesar Monto (Weston Cage Coppola) prowls the streets for his victims, going unnoticed by a police department looking in an entirely different direction.
Monto’s presence, of course, is just speculation about the identity of the killer, and immediately, a major director’s procedural epic about the search for an unknown serial killer (recently reviewed in a retrospective on this site, if that offers a hint) comes to mind. For a while, Ortega and Young are drawn into the possibility of the worst kind of corruption in their own department, as an officer named Tate (Michael Sirow), renowned for his sleazy ways, is discovered to have had relations with nearly all the victims. Somehow, the movie forgets to give any of those victims, who were mostly sex workers but some of whom were teenagers, a voice in this story.
The nature of the story does mean that Boneyard packs a certain, surprising potency once we get into the territory of the detectives’ search narrowing and inevitably petering out. That final scene, when read as a reminder of the killer’s elusiveness and not as a sequel stinger, packs a real punch, too. We spend the movie, though, wishing it told this story with more – or any – precision.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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