This is one of those films where you’re supposed to allow yourself to get caught up in the secret world of the characters. In this case pathologists – the guys and gals that cut up dead bodies to explain the cause of death.
Only it doesn’t pan out that way. Instead I found it more like a tale of schoolyard cliques, only populated by adults. Douchey, uniformly reprehensible adults.
Ted Grey is a Harvard grad, fresh back from a stint in Africa and away from wealthy and privileged girlfriend Gwen (Alyssa Milano), to join a new inner city hospital.
It takes Ted but one walk-by to prove his chops, as he dispassionately and analytically breaks down a tough case with stupefying ease as the other confused docs look on. Yay Ted.
These other guys n gals are the ‘cool kids’, three guys and two gals sharing the same attitudes and seemingly the same fortunate gene pool. They are blessed with good looks, quick wits and snide vocabularies and demeanours. The cool kids are obnoxious snobbish dicks – I could happily underline that 46 times to emphasise the point – who pick on everyone else from their ivory towers of popularity and self satisfaction.
Gee this really evolved into an examination of my school years fast didn’t it?
Within days Ted is accepted cautiously by the work all day – party all night group of pretty morons. And this is where the film disappears up its on hook-filled arse…
Not content with drinking, drugs and general debauchery, the cool kids have devised a game of living Cluedo, where freshly supplied dead bodies are examined by the crew, with the game being to work out how they were killed. While this might also loosely describe their day jobs the quirk here is that the game is BYOB – with the last B standing for ‘body’.
Ted is immediately aghast that these young beautiful people with the world at their feet would stoop to killing innocents for their own amusement. I was aghast that anyone thought this even blackly entertaining.
Pathology is a heroless affair. Everyone in it is a scumbag or scumbag-gette in their own way, even Ted, who is so bland and humourless that he seems to have less life than his subjects.
The film devolves into a blur of drugs, murder, unnecessary surgery and other miscellaneous ‘dangerous’ stuff.
It’s most astounding for me that the guys who came up with the two lunatic Crank films penned this turgid desperate nonsense. Where those films were fun and funny, Pathology is drab and depressing.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. The only thing worse that ending up a dead body with these idiots around would be watching this film again.
