Boneyard (2024)

Boneyard
Boneyard

After the opening words of Mel Gibson, “The Bible says we should rejoice in our suffering”, most viewers would expect more substance than Boneyard. However, this campy romp through the fictional retelling of the West Mesa Murders which is a still-unsolved string of crime that was in the southwestern part of the United States during the early years of this century fits that unpleasant, if not downright dubious exploitation template “sound of freedom” in comparison.

In the same manner as ‘Sound of Freedom’, the movie is also reputedly based on true events. Similarly, Asif Akbar’s movie successfully weaves lurid serial-killer fetishism that is in the vein of MaXXXine’s grindhouse visuals and thumping investigative procedures involving numerous avaricious and uncooperative detectives. Four screenwriters are credited, and while the results remind this viewer of four screenplays reintegrated into a single incoherent narrative deck of cards, no sooner have Nico and Deborah sentenced started shuffling, Gibson’s marquee name has been largely ‘barred out by the deck’. This weak sort-of thriller will not be making even close to the din “Sound of freedom” has managed to create. The movie is scheduled to receive limited theatrical release by Lionsgate on July 5, alongside its on-demand release on July 2.

The bodies of eleven females, aged from 15 to 32 who were missing for a considerable amount of time, were subsequently discovered during this investigation. The bodies of women were last seen near an arroyo outside Albuquerque in 2009, just after a local woman reported discovering human remains while out walking her dog.

After identifying the remains, the bodies turned out to be mostly Hispanic women snuffed out and put in graves between the ages of four to eight years ago. Although police interrogated several people of interest, no one was ever charged or linked to the case in a conclusive manner – although rather mysteriously the murders did appear to stop after one of them was shot and killed in the year 2006.

Here, a similar finding causes police chief Carter (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) to allocate partnered detectives Young (Nora Zehetner) and Ortega (Brian Van Holt) as the homicide leads. But they are also bolstered by an additional resource in the shape of Agent Petrovick, a character from Gibson’s ongoing sketch of a drunkard but resourceful people, who in this case possesses more bloodhound instinct than the rest of the team. He states that the main suspect is probably a 30-year-old male Latino who is a “mission-oriented killer” and adds, “He thinks he is making the world a better place, cleansing it of all the people that make him sin.”

Oval-faced, overweight, bespectacled loner Caesar (Weston Cage Coppola) fits that profile precisely. We observe him as he watches several young women, “pros” and others, usually from a distance.

But then, suspicion also extends to Officer Tate, referred to as Michael Sirow “the sleaziest cop on the beat,” who is known to have had all the late victims in some shady exchanges as well as possibly other things like with drug cartels, human traffickers, etc.

Seeming mainly to remain on the margins of the narrative although he often delivers hard-boiled ponderous phrases in the voiceover Petrovick attempts to self-locate by pronouncing, “This case was personal.” A few years ago, he had lost a daughter in a drive-by shooting. But then this is the type of trite-filled genre in which everyone is ‘personal’ as most of the central characters have some unrealistic background of losing someone in some similar way. The combination of overarching themes, subplots, and flashbacks to off-the-point digressions are so un-integrative in their binding structural strength that there is none. It appears more concerned with depicting each of the important people featured in their ‘out of control’ violent emotional hysterical screaming scene even if their role is such that it does not have much of anything else to offer anyway as it is relatively brief.

Akbar, a writer-director-producer who does not lack work, supervising a handful of relatively unnoticed films in recent years, does not show much skill in managing actors. So the resulting effect is rather uneven with the cast more or less being allowed to run free.

It is Vincent E. McDaniel, who plays the role of Tate’s narcotics department superior, along with Gibson and several others, who manage to retain some grace. They ought to be more creative than that by being horrible, while the villains are given an inordinate amount of latitude to overact. Quite a few of the participants appear to be completely out of their depth perhaps the most volatile and inexplicable of these is Jackson who has in the years he has done more than enough screen work that must have led to poor practice since ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin.’

“Boneyard” may be fundamentally uninspired, but Reis’s camera work and Cooper’s editing make it bearable yet the film feels slow, plotless, and empty. It feels like a poorly done imitation of quite a few cop shows it aspires to, complete with a handy cam as if it is trying hard to convey a sense of urgency that is not there. These instabilities are further emphasized by the ominous drumbeats featured in Smith’s original score.

There are not that many murder scenes throughout the film, which is probably for the best, since Akbar mostly transitions from women getting into strangers’ cars, directly to the assassin’s shovel burying the body. However, considering that the actresses who are supposed to play prostitutes or other targets have managed to somewhat evoke sympathy for their characters, such an emotion as the extreme feeling of fear of death does not come through. The film starts with the caption “dedicated to victims of the West Mesa Murders”, yet it makes you feel that those helpless young ladies have suffered once again from being in a B-movie that is not even decent enough to portray them realistically.

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