Watcher, The

A serial killer (Keanu Reeves) and a burned-out FBI agent (James Spader) match wits again when the killer follows the G-man to his new home in Chicago and returns to his old habits, mailing the agent pictures of his chosen victims one day before killing them. The David Elliot/Clay Ayers script follows the standard pattern of the serial-killer genre, and director Joe Charbanic gives it the snazzy, show-off gloss of his music video roots. There’s a distasteful air of snuff-film pornography—the victims in these films are never men, or old ladies, or anything but sexy young women—spiced with a grisly homoerotic subtext between Reeves and Spader’s characters. Marisa Tomei does a solemn, thankless turn as Spader’s shrink, but her real plot function is obvious: she might as well wear a bull’s-eye on her back.