Some spoilerage will be the order of the day
as we discuss this odd thriller 'Meeting Evil' with you
because there are those who have seen this movie and have some
questions about what was going on. No, I don't have any
definitive answers to those questions but as an old football
coach used to tell me, opinions are like assholes and
everybody has one… so I have one too.
John, (Luke Wilson) is having a very bad day by almost
anybody's definition of a bad day. He's been fired from
his job, he's learned his house is in foreclosure, and that
shirtless guy working on the pool in his back yard is leaving
John's house looking way too happy. John didn't pay him
for service provided last month, but this guy says 'they're
square'. What in the world could substitute for money?
But that's neither here nor there at the moment because after
a botched surprise party that John's wife Joanie (Leslie Bibb)
tried to throw her husband, with the help of their two well
fed children, John gets a surprise visitor. Richie
(Samuel L. Jackson) knocks on John's door looking for help as
his muscle car won't start. John agrees to give him a
push, hurts his leg in the process and to make things up to
him Richie offers John a ride to the hospital.
John doesn't make it to the hospital and it's not long before
John realizes that Richie's elevator doesn't rise all the way
to the top. He's a couple eggs short of a dozen.
His house is occupied but there's nobody home. He's
psycho is what we're saying. What tipped us off?
It could be the unfortunate event at the gas station when that
attendant made the mistake of asking Richie
for some I.D. when he was paying for his gas, or maybe the
ultra rude cell phone store clerk who wouldn't let John use
the phone that met an unfortunate end. 'Richie' and
'Unfortunate Ends' are two things that go together like peanut
butter and chocolate in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in this
movie.
So Richie is psycho and he's killed a bunch of people but he
hasn't killed John. In fact he seems to want to help
John for whatever reason. He sure does know an awful lot
about John, like info on his family, his kid's names, the fact
that he lost his job or the affair he was having with the
pretty girl at the office (Peyton List)… Richie knows it
all. He even knows a few secrets his wife is hiding from
John.
The immediate problem for John at the moment is that while
Richie is psychologically torturing him, the police think that
John is the guy committing these murders. These cops are
really dumb. John tries to try to tell these dumb cops
that he's innocent and that there's a crazy Black guy doing
all this murdering… something I'm pretty sure a real life cop
would believe right away… and that his family is in grave
danger. Or maybe they're not in grave danger. I
mean Richie is there at the house, he has a gun, he could kill
everybody, but that Richie… who knows.
Before we get down to dissecting director Chris Fisher's
'Meeting Evil', let's just say outright it's a mess of
movie. It's a genre defying mishmash of stuff, which can
be a great thing if the film we are watching is coherent and
concise, none of which applies to this movie. That being
said we still have the trump card of Luke Wilson playing a put
upon everyman and Samuel L. Jackson playing a hair trigger
psycho, parts which both men can play in their sleep, which at
least makes 'Meeting Evil' watchable.
But what exactly are we watching, I guess is the question that
we can't completely answer. It looks like Richie's a
hitman hired by John's wife to take him out.
Maybe. But why not… I mean John is unfaithful, broke,
and appears to be a lousy husband and father. But the
way the movie plays out it's looking like Richie may have some
kind of superpowers, like he's a demon from another dimension
since he's all-knowing, omnipresent, and seems to have
time/space spatial displacement abilities since he can appear
just about anywhere at virtually any time. There's also
this little girl floating around the movie kind of tormenting
Richie, and I'm sure she represents something or another but
hell if I know what that is. No opinion on that
one.
Ultimately it appears to us that Richie isn't a demon, has no
superpowers, and is just a psycho who lives in a reality where
psychos have time / space powers, the cops are super lousy,
people are super stupid, and where a hitman can kill everybody
except the one guy he was paid to kill which makes him
terrible at his job. Why didn't Richie kill John?
He felt sorry for him? He reminded Riche of himself in a
previous life? John is dead already on the inside?
Just about anything in this one is open for discussion but
ultimately we'll stick with Richie being just some whackjob in
a wacky alternate earth filled with stupid people all trapped
in a movie that had mad potential, but ultimately was not very
good. This doesn't mean that 'Meeting Evil' didn't have
some entertainment value, because it did have a little of
that, but 'entertaining' and 'good' aren't mutually exclusive
terms in our alternate reality.
