Average
Summary
A fun little thriller headed by the always watchable Robert Patrick, Pavement is unlikely to feature on anyone’s “best of” list, but it’s entertaining while it’s on and it adds a good twist or two to the conventional serial killer genre.
Plot: A deranged killer with unusual MO is loose in San Francisco. The cops can’t stop him, but perhaps Sam Brown, a tracker, and brother of the first victim, can using his exceptional skills.
Review: Pavement premiered on HBO in the early 2000’s and later appeared on DVD a year or so after. It always intrigued me, but I never got around to watching it until now. Am I happy I saw it? Yeah. It’s a fun thriller and Robert Patrick is always great.
His character, Sam Brown, is an enigmatic silent hero type who can scale buildings and kill feral wolves by hand so he’s instantly intriguing.
Lauren Holly plays the cop Brown crosses paths with and surprisingly, the pair have great chemistry and there’s a laugh or too to be had when Brown stays over at her place.
As I said earlier, the killer’s method is highly unusual and so is the killer! I have to say, his reason for killing is actually quite inspired and makes sense given his tortured past. Alex Duncan, who plays the disfigured culprit, is very good and creepy in what could have been a throw away role.
Directed by Darrell James Roodt (Dangerous Ground), Pavement isn’t all smooth sailing. As with most thrillers from that era, the film relies on jumpy, over stylised editing. I wish Hollywood would just let a film tell its story without all this distracting nonsense. I’m sure it’s something the producers thought would be a good idea, but it ages the film terribly and it’s more annoying than entertaining.
Also, despite Patrick and Holly’s excellent performances and some genuinely creepy moments, the film also has the dumbest SWAT team in history. They run into rooms, fully exposed, and get gunned down by the handful. Surely that isn’t standard training, right??
Overall, Pavement is a fun and suitably trashy thriller but it gets some serious points for trying to play things differently. Patrick is always watchable. Holly is good as the vulnerable cop and the killer is something we haven’t seen before. It ain’t perfect but it’s made by reliable pros who give their best to the material.