Horsemen
Jonas Akerlund

The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports could consider promoting this movie. After all, the message here is: spend more time with your children.
But this message is hammered into the viewer in a sensationalistic manner with a series of horrific killings in which the victims are hung from assorted contraptions with industrial-strength meat hooks.
Seldom has the dangers of parental neglect been spelt out so gruesomely.
Dennis Quaid is the detective in charge of the case, oblivious to what is happening under his own nose, while Zhang Ziyi plays the adopted daughter of one of the victims.
Big-time Swedish music video director Jonas Akerlund’s overwrought second feature piles on the religious associations. The movie title refers to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The effect, though, is hokey rather than genuinely unsettling.
He tries to dodge the tag of exploitation by turning this into a cautionary tale, but the moral lesson just feels hastily slapped on.
(ST)