Cynical Cinema

The Flock is the first American effort from Hong Kong film maker Andrew Lau, who is famous for his excellent Infernal Affairs triolgy, the movies which were made into the Scorcese masterpiece The Departed.  However, with The Flock he falls a little short.  The movie is about Richard Gere, who is basically a parole officer for sex offenders.  When we meet him, he is being forcibly retired from his job, since he seems to have lost his mind a little bit.  He is going to be replaced by Claire Danes, and he’ll be teaching her the ropes before he’s done.  But he’s so over the edge that she is not only afraid of the sexual deviants with which they deal every day, she’s also afraid of Gere because he’s clearly a maniac.

When a girl goes missing, the two of them attempt to solve the crime, even though they are not the police, based on the sex offender registry and interviews of Gere’s “flock”, which is how he describes his group of criminals.  The people who took the girl appear to be targeting Gere himself, based on a clue they left just for him at the table where he always sits at the diner where he always goes.  They are sending HIM a message - but why him, why that message, what the abductors hope to gain from it - we never find out.  Why?  Who cares.  Here are some people doing awful things to other people.  Isn’t that awful?  Now let’s get to the end of the film.

Andrew Lau’s previous movies have been brilliant in their depiction of cops and cop culture, as action and drama intersect with double crosses and informants, and complex stories are made to seem much simpler.  However, in The Flock, he makes a fairly simple, straightfoward story seem much more complex than it has to be.  In the end, we get Gere being a tough-guy lunatic, Claire Danes crying a lot, and weird sexually deviant behaviour in rooms in the background.  And that’s about it.  The final scene with the abducted girl is tawdry and contrived, although it does convey an appropriate level of creepiness.

Oh, and one more thing - when you have the credits at the beginning of the movie, with the five main actors who are going to be in the film, and one of those actors is a name people will recognize (in this case Avril Lavigne), you have to understand that you are setting them up already.  Say you’re watching a film, and the first six names that flash at you include, say for the sake of argument, Christopher Walken.  And he appears for about four seconds, ten minutes into the movie.  And then you don’t see him again at all.  But at the end, when the mystery is unraveling, you kind of think to yourself - Christopher Walken got third billing in this movie…I bet he’s the killer…and of course you’d be right.  In this film, it doesn’t happen exactly that way, and it’s a little better done than that.  But still, the end came as absolutely no shock to me based on the opening credits and the rest of the movie.