Molloy (Sylvester Stallone) is an experienced FBI agent with a string of successes and high profile collars. Yet he is low on ideas and patience with his current prey, a serial killer who targets cops, then taunts his pursuers with every body left behind.
The cops aren’t happy. It’s one thing to kill civilians, another entirely to kill cops… apparently.
Then the Bad Guy proves to Molloy once and for all that this case is personal. First by telling him just that, then by killing Molloy’s missus and leaving her hanging from the ceiling of his apartment. You’d think just the first thing would have gotten the message across, but this Bad Guy obviously felt he had to be sure the message came across loud and clear.
It worked. A few months, dozens of empty spirit bottles and a suicide attempt later, and Molloy wakes up in rehab, having been practically dragged there by his former boss Hendricks (Charles S Dutton).
Only this is not your Grandma Lohan’s rehab. This one is just for cops. A top secret operation in the middle of nowhere with a skeleton staff of one nurse and one grizzled ‘team leader’ in the form of Doc (Kris Kristofferson), himself an ex-cop, whose version of ‘treatment’ sounds like “Oh get over yourself you weak pussy”.
Surrounding Molloy is nothing more than a bunch of walls with a snowstorm raging outside, and 10 other ex-cops inside, all battling personal demons.
Then one by one they start dropping, and Molloy swiftly realises that a killer is among them.
The very thing that aims to make D-Tox (aka Eye See You) so very tense and unpredictable is what makes it convoluted and ultimately unmemorable. There are simply too many similar characters about the place, all playing the role of ‘could-be’ killers. Eventually I stopped caring just who was and who wasn’t a suspect at about the same time that I stopped caring who would live and who would die.
In the end I just hoped it was all come to an end quickly.
D-Tox might be ‘Fincher gloomy’ but it lacks his visual panache and creativity. It is the kind of who-dunnit? that stumbles for 90 minutes then pulls a killer out of it’s arse and expects us to gasp.
It’s also a decidedly atypical Sly Stallone part. For the most part he dwells only on the periphery of the action, especially in the second half of the film. Sure occasionally he has to break up a disagreement or to chase a shadowy figure without getting close enough to see their face and unveil the ‘real killer’, but mostly he just stands around looking dopey and extraneous.
I should also point out that he got paid $20,000,000 for looking dopey and extraneous. If they had have waited a few years they might have seen that nowadays he does it for free…
Final Rating – 5 / 10. Not the worst film you’ll ever see, but definitely the most clumsily and unnecessarily hyphenated.
