Critical: Pathology

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

Of this movie’s 93 minute running time, I think there was about 10 minutes of decent stuff. This, of course, is a not a good ratio.

The problem is not that the concept is a bad idea. Med students kill people for fun and then try to guess how it happened. It’s sick and twisted and could make for a decent picture. Unfortunately, there’s no one to root for. The main character is Ted (Milo Ventimiglia) and I suppose you are meant to side with him, but there are two big problems with this. One, he’s as much a murderer as the villains are, and two, he cheats on Alyssa Milano multiple times, so screw him. Making matters worse is that Ted has no real reason for going on a killing spree. He starts because killing people is part of human nature (sure, that’s a good motivation for the protagonist to have) and he stops because of his classmates takes it too far (by killing 3 people at once…but how is that any different from what Ted has been doing?).

The rest of the cast are woefully two-dimensional. Three of the five members of the murder club have a total of 15 minutes of screen time, and they never display any real characters at all. The black-haired girl, whose name I never discerned, likes to get high and is bisexual. The smug jerk with the glasses is a smug jerk with glasses. The other guy is just a random guy who has no defining traits at all. Only Juliette and Jake get any real development, and even that basically amounts to: Juliette is a loose woman and Jake is crazy as a loon.

A couple sequences do save Pathology from being a complete waste. There’s a montage in the middle of the movie that features murder, autopsies, and sex set to a Renholder tune, and that 5 minutes seems like it belongs in a much more competent movie. Additionally, the last few minutes of the movie feature a final kill that is very well done and sufficiently creepy, even if it does come out of nowhere. 10 minutes is not enough to save a movie, but it does a good job of making it tolerable.