Killing Emmett Young (2002)

AKA: Emmett's Mark, this was sent straight-to-video for no reason. It's pretty good.Scott Wolf plays the title character who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Young meets a stranger (Byrne) who can a hire a hit-man (Tim Roth) to kill him. Young accepts the offer at first, but he changes his mind at the last minute and now has to stop his own death.The best part of the movie is the performance by Roth. He could just phone in his role, but he puts in an extra layer of character development that makes you like him. Byrne and Wolf also put in fine performances. There's also a really well-shot foot chase and while there's no reason for it, it was welcomed. If you're looking for something different, "Killing Emmett Young" is a decent choice.For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

It was made in Philly, my hometown, and having Gabriel Byrne plus Tim Roth probably assured some decent acting, but as luck had it, Pam figured out the mistaken diagnosis before the film was 15 minutes old. Thus as I watched the rest of the film develop, I kept thinking in the back of my mind, 'does the Police Health & Welfare Plan rule out second opinions?' Man is told he is going to die soon from an illness, and he doesn't see if the doctor could be mistaken.I read the other reviews where some praise and some damn the film's open end style. In this case I think the writer(s) may simply have run out of inspiration or ideas. Do we want Emmett to go back to his girlfriend, or get involved with his co-worker? Who knows? We will let the viewers decide. What does it mean when Roth can't pull the trigger? Is this some sort of comment on his whole sexual life, or is he granting life in place of the one he took previously? The pose seems almost out of Michaelangelo's Creation on the ceiling at the Sistine. Is failed detective Roth giving the spark of life to the man he just wounded? The questions keep piling up. The serial rapist drives an SUV; so does Emmett? Coincidence? I have played solve the crime board games that were more enlightened than this series of questions.Pam, and another reviewer, commented on the phone conversation between Emmett and Roth. I'd driven past this intersection on April 4th of this year. The camera actually dresses up the area, and while there is a union hiring hall nearby, and the area is less than a mile from police headquarters, the site of two white men standing on that corner meant that it was either just after daylight or an optical illusion. In fact, I found the views of neighborhoods during foot chases eliminated any of the demographics of Philadelphia. The only Black people we see seem to be policemen.

There's little to praise and much to fault about "Killing Emmett Young" as it was entitled on cable. An old story about a cop with a terminal illness who hires a 3rd party hitman to kill him so he won't suffer and then learns the lab screwed up his blood test results and he's really not going to die...at least not from the disease. He tries desperately to call off the hit but the middleman is terminally unavailable. Etc. This uninspired indie seems to be little more than a paycheck for some good actors who dutifully go through the requisite motions. However, there is some interconnectedness between characters and subplots capable of whetting interest which may be sufficient to make this flick couch potato fodder. Worth Tivo'ing where the investment is minimal and the delete button is only a thumb away. (C+)

Spoiler Alert!! Hmmm...interesting movie. I've just spent some 12 hours watching "Emmett's Mark" from start to finish, from finish to start, in between, backwards and forwards, in slow-mo, in zoom X 4, and also the deleted scenes. And, I still haven't got a darn clue 'who done it'!! My Girlfriend and I are both avid movie watchers and, despite what some people might say, we are generally not devoid of brain cells. But... WHO DONE IT??!?!. Reading other comments of this flick, along with those for it's alias "Killing Emmett Young" in other parts of the world, the ending appears to be regarded as more or less open-ended. Here are some of the things that have kept us guessing :They seem to refer to the patches of skin missing where tattoo's had been removed from the victims' bodies as 'bruised tissue'. This seems to imply a softer aspect of something which is quite blatant and obvious corpse mutilation, and would in all likelyhood be picked up on much earlier than at the end when Emmett happened across a tattoo studio.It would appear that there are 2 plots running in the movie - that's fine. But the ending seemed to leave more questions than it answered. Who was the serial killer? If it was Dwyer, the movie would have ended when he died and handed over the phone message note with Alison's recall of having been at "Vic's". Was Dwyer the serial killer, or just a lonely man who relied on his porn to get him through his moments of sexual frustration? How did Emmett actually get to talk to Dwyer's lady friend, Suzanne, if she was the person referred to as the 'anonymous tip'? Who was the guy Emmett staked out in the park and was this guy doing perverse things under his coat and filming it? Why didn't Emmett take a shot at him as the suspect fled? (not a big ask in America these days).Emmett is supposedly a smart and observant profiler-cop, yet he didn't notice Dwyer standing closely behind him and staring intensely at him in the music store, nor did he hear Dwyer's pager beep just as he was crossing the road to drill Emmett full of lead. He also seems to have missed Dwyer fishing out a rather large wad of bills from his pocket as he looked for his keys. Yet he did notice that Dwyer had stuffed all his sordid things in a cupboard, which he left open. Hmmm...and where did that large aquarium thing in the left corner of the lounge disappear to?Did Suzanne rat Dwyer out after she saw what she considered gross porn and junk lying all around his apartment? Oddly enough, his apartment seemed to go through varying phases from tidy to abjectly disgraceful. The door knob to Dwyer's apartment also had me intrigued. When Suzanne tried the door, it was unlocked and the inner door knob fell on the floor. She merely popped it back into position rather than screw it back properly. Later, when Dwyer returned, the door knob was properly affixed.Having reviewed the shoot-through-the-door scene in close-up and slow-mo, Emmett sustains a gun-shot graze to the upper right eye area, yet the bullets came through the left side of the peep-hole and above. Why did Emmett bolt straight for the bedroom to his personal revolver instead of going directly to the drawer where he had just retired his service automatic? Both Emmett's personal revolver, and the one Dwyer got from Bracken appear to have been 4-inch nickel-plated Colt Python's. Maybe that was just to send us into a tail-spin, but Dwyer appeared to replace Emmett's Colt *and* the ammunition back into the little tool-box he used to store it in his cupboard earlier on. When Emmett was finally forced to use his revolver, the speed-loader was gone, and the packet of cartridges was still there, but empty. We saw a speed loader and a similar packet of cartridges in Dwyer's apartment when Suzanne stumbled in while someone was in the shower (presumably Dwyer, getting ready for his date with her).Dwyer had the chance to finish Emmett off, but he chose not to. Was it because he thought it was game-over and Emmett had nailed him for Bracken's murder and/or the serial killings, or just that deep down he was not really a cold blooded killer? (apart from beating both a former Junior Officer and Bracken to death - though Bracken seemed to have used the "you're a nothing, never will be, and I helped you get acquitted so you owe me" on Dwyer once too often. Plus, he didn't pay him).A crucial piece of dialogue was fast and mumbled when Emmett met Millstat between the latest abductee's front door and the squad car. Something like 'Mills Lake moth/mum'. Plus the reference to a 'dark SUV', which I'm guessing is something like a 4 Wheel Drive? (hmmm... Emmett just happened to drive a similar car - could it have been him all along?).Oh, and why did Emmett only read the case-breaking note after his convalescence?Lots of unanswered questions, but all in all, an enjoyable movie, but the ending seemed too open and rather rushed. Perhaps that's what Keith Snyder had planned all along?