The Postcard Killings

The murder mystery story is a popular basis for movies and shows due to its adaptability and flexibility for different genres, tones, topics, and styles. A murder mystery can be whimsical and charming, like last year's hit Knives Out, or it can be grisly, chilling, and suspenseful like David Fincher's classic Seven. The best murder movies are clever, taut scripts with unique premises or twists to make them stand out from the rest.

But sometimes you watch one and can't help but think that it would have been better off as an hour-long prime-time episode of a crime show instead of a feature-length film. That's what The Postcard Killings is.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Jacob Kanon, a New York detective whose daughter was just murdered, along with her husband, while honeymooning in Europe. It was gruesome, their bodies apparently posed on a bed together with certain appendages removed. His estranged wife Valerie (Famke Janssen) resents him for paying their way and encouraging them to go to Europe, among the other ways Jacob apparently always "had to be the one she loved the most." (That's about the extent of information we get about their relationship pre-murder.)

Jacob is unsatisfied with the local police's efforts to solve his daughter's murder. Being a detective himself, he thinks they could do better. He thinks he could do better. As other, similarly posed corpses of couples begin to pop up all over Europe, Jacob begins to realize that the death won't stop until the perpetrator is found. So, for his own and Valerie's peace, I guess, Jacob swears to find out who did this. Totally shut out by the various European police forces he encounters, he teams up with a Scandinavian journalist (Cush Jumbo) who receives a tip about the murders.

Meanwhile, the film intermittently cuts to two other newlyweds (Naomi Battrick and Ruairi O'Connor) embarking on a European honeymoon, and presumably, unknowingly walking into a deathtrap.

The Postcard Killings is a bad script, and it's probably the most at fault for this bland movie. It's based on a James Patterson novel, "The Postcard Killers," and, having never read any of his work, it feels like what I've always assumed his crime novels were like: rushed, copy-and-paste, and stuck to formula. I have no idea if Killers is any good, but the movie isn't. Riddled with contrived and undercooked plot beats, there's barely a scene in which the consequence of the characters' actions can't be assumed from the start.

Morgan and Janssen (on the rare occasion that she's on-screen) try their best to act their way out of the trite dialogue and hammy blocking, but the efforts still don't make most of it convincing. It's the kind of film that tries to be overly cinematic and overly realistic at once, and always comes off as artificial.

There is a mildly interesting twist regarding the identity of the killer, but it comes late enough and with low enough stakes that it only really deflates the tension of the movie from that point on. The majority of Jacob's journey to find the killer feels all-too easy, and there's no catch.

It's a visually drab film as well, more similar to TV crime than its film counterparts. Cold, grey, with any good cinematography chopped up by bad editing.

It's the worst kind of mediocrity: too bland to be either intriguing or offensive, neither stimulating on even a basic level nor jarring as a trainwreck of filmmaking. Lop off an hour of it, and you might have just enough for a forgettable episode in a disappointing season of Criminal Minds.