Director : E. Elias Merhige Starring : Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, Carrie-Anne Moss

Given that it's pretty much just a standard serial killer movie with a few telepathic trappings thrown in here and there, Suspect Zero is a little better than you'd, well, suspect. A little too artful and only a little unnerving, this thriller by E. Elias Merhige suffers from the same malady as that his previous film, Shadow of the Vampire. While that film had a great cast, a great plot device, and style to burn, despite a stellar performance by Willem Dafoe as a real-life Nosferatu, it was just a little…. boring. Intriguing set-ups would give way to tedious exposition, the story would tend to meander, and the promise that it offered was never really fulfilled. Still, it came together fairly well at the end, and left you with the feeling that while it wasn't certainly bad, it could have been much, much better.

You could almost say the same thing about Suspect Zero, except that instead of a brilliant concept like an actual vampire playing a vampire in a classic movie, it has at its core instead a serial killer targeting other serial killers. A somewhat promising premise, though it's just a twist on what's already turning into a very tedious and repetitive genre that's seen not just one (Taking Lives) but two (Twisted) failed stabs at revitalization in the past six months. (Go back a little over a year and you can add Gothika, In the Cut, Identity, and The Order to the mix – fine company, eh?) Not only does it tread very familiar ground, but Suspect Zero also attempts to co-opt the two movies that put serial killers on the modern movie map: The Silence of the Lambs (by making its hero an intrepid, misunderstood FBI agent with a special insight into killers) and Seven (by making its villain a showy murderer with a penchant for unique calling cards). Already, Suspect Zero has a heady sense of déjà vu – and the plot's just getting started.

Tom Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart, all jawline and cheekbones) is a disgraced FBI agent sent down to "the minors" in New Mexico after botching a previous case in which his lack of procedural protocol resulted in an guilty killer going free. With barely enough time to warm his office chair, Mackelway's assigned to a peculiar case – the murder of a traveling salesman, whose car and body was pulled to the Arizona/New Mexico border to insure that FBI involvement would be mandatory. Not only that, he's getting faxes galore about missing children, all sent by the same mysterious sender. Teamed up with his former partner, Fran Kulok (Carrie-Anne Moss, whose cheekbones seem to be jockeying with Eckhart's for audience attention), Mackelway happens upon a rather odd suspect: Benjamin O'Ryan (Ben Kingsley), self-professed former FBI agent who has a special, telepathic knack for hunting killers via self-induced trances and sketches of potential crime scenes. A member of a shady FBI experiment called "Project Icarus," O'Ryan apparently had a theory about the quintessential serial killer, a "suspect zero" who was a killing machine with no rhyme or reason to his crimes, making him all the more impossible to track down. Oh, in the meantime, O'Ryan is himself going after other serial killers, leaving tantalizing clues for Mackelway to uncover. And so the question arises: is O'Ryan himself "suspect zero"? And why is he leading Mackelway to his door?

Despite the heavy spirits of The Silence of the Lambs and Seven that hang over Suspect Zero, the movie it seems to really want to be is The Ring, but about serial killers instead of vengeful, murderous children. With its grainy film stock, artful camera angles and jumps, and decorative use of folk art that wouldn't look out of place in a Greenwich Village art gallery, it's a movie that screams technique and asks for attention in a steady, insidious manner. Yet, despite all the gimmickry that Merhige piles onto the screenplay (a mishmash of genre conventions compiled by Zak Penn and Billy Ray), the director's true knack for very good, basic filmmaking shines through. Granted, he's not working with very much – his lead character is humorless and stolid, his villain chews scenery like Hannibal Lecter chewing fava beans, and his set-up is one beat away from the template for Serial Killer Screenwriting 101 – but Merhige manages to instill a nice sense of dread every now and then, and his careful work with his actors shines through in very brief yet very potent moments (a weary three-second look by Eckhart telegraphs more than three minutes of dialogue). A standard suspense chase scene, in which Eckhart follows a potential suspect through a crowded carnival, slowly reaches off the screen and surprisingly grabs your heart and squeezes it until you wonder where the hell all that panic came from, and why you're freaking out so much. Unfortunately, a lot of the movie's power is undone by Suspect Zero himself, who isn't just a murderer but a murderer of kids, and the move jumps the line between entertainment and exploitation far too many times to make the queasy implications easy to dismiss.

Still, while you're trying to dodge all the icky parts of the movie, you can enjoy some surprisingly effective performances. After the one-two career punch of The Core and Paycheck, Eckhart saves himself from B-movie leading man status with a nice turn in what's essentially a one-dimensional role, and gives Mackelway enough nuances around the edges to soften the woodenness and predictability that seems to come with his standard-issue character. His interaction with Moss, when they're not doing the standard FBI bickering, is sweet and touching, and the one scene where they take down their combative barriers plays just the right hints of regret and eroticism (and all the more impressive considering it lasts less than five minutes). And though Kingsley turns on the histrionics just a bit, the chemistry between him and Eckhart in the film's climax works, and is almost enough to redeem the I-could-have-seen-it-a-mile-away ending. The two manage to give a little class to a genre that now desperately needs all the help it can get.