In “The Watcher,” a hodgepodge of half-baked visual styles can’t
disguise the fact that this dismal thriller is all situation and no story.
Not many thrills, either.

Nice explosions, though.

Reeves, puffy but not half as creepy as he needs to be, plays a murderer
who has stalked a burned-out FBI agent (James Spader) from Los Angeles to
Chicago. It’s a reverse nemesis kind of thing.

Now, David Allen Griffin (Reeves) is taunting Special Agent Jack Campbell
by sending him photographs of his victims, all young women, 24 hours before
he kills them.

“The Watcher” is the first feature film directed by Joe Charbanic, a
director of television commercials and music vid
eos who has done videos for Reeves’ rock group, Dogstar. At the end of
scenes, images go from positive to negative with a great thwack! on the
sound track. There’s click motion, slo-mo, blurred images and, the most
provocative of all, video.

At first, the visual mess seems to be merely the arty product of
someone’s short attention span. There is a method, however, to the use of
video, but when it starts to make some sense and gain momentum, the idea
just falls off the table. The expected follow-
through never comes.

Marisa Tomei plays Special Agent Campbell’s psychiatrist. He is a wreck.
He pops pills to go to sleep, injects meth to keep going during the day and
lives in a mess of an apartment that is an accurate reflection of his state
of mind.

He is as demoralized as the audience will become. After a while, holing
up in his ratty apartment seems a reasonable
alternative to watching the rest of this movie.

Reeves makes an effort to give the killer creepy little idiosyncrasies.
He talks to his victims in a soft, reassuring manner. After they are tied
up, he does a weird little dance in front of them.

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Without half trying, Spader is better at creepy. The killer is supposed
to have a symbiotic relationship with the FBI agent, but they should have
taken it a step further: Reeves and Spader should have exchanged roles.

There are a couple of shock cuts in “The Watcher,” but that’s about it.
What kind of thriller is this, where nothing that anyone cares about is at
stake?

A pair of infernos provide some of the better moments in this film, even
if there are holes in this story big enough to drive a flaming car through.

One of them involves the FBI man’s transformation from hollow-eyed,
strung-out medication junkie to well-
groomed agent. He looks so good they put him in charge of the investigation.

– Advisory: This film contains violence.
..

E-mail Bob Graham at bgraham@sfchronicle.com.