I've been following IMDb's lead lately and it hasn't been pretty. They've recommended a series of Tommy Lee Jones (TLJ) movies that I've watched with mixed reviews. "In the Electric Mist" (IEM) is the third TLJ movie after "The Missing" and "The Three Burials of Malquiades Estrada."

IEM takes place in post-Katrina Louisiana in and around the area of Iberia Parish. It begins with Det. Dave Robicheaux (TLJ) investigating the murder of a young lady named Cherry LeBlanc. She was a "working" girl found in the Louisiana swamps badly mutilated. We get some retro gumshoe movie narration from Dave and we'd get narration from him scattered throughout the movie.

IEM was a standard murder mystery. I can watch standard murder mysteries all day even if they're as basic as this one. This movie was as basic and unimaginative as they get. With that as a baseline, any hiccups were going to make the movie a dud, and it had a few failures which knocked it down a peg or two.

Failure #1: Dave seemed to be the smartest person in all of Louisiana, or at least the smartest in his neck of the woods. There were two set-ups that could've been easily proved, yet the police there were too dumb to see it. The first set-up is when someone set-up Dave to make it seem as though he murdered an unarmed girl named Angel. A few cursory questions would've made it clear that he didn't kill her. The second set-up was someone making it seem as though his friend Lou Girard (Pruitt Taylor Vince) killed himself. Again, it wouldn't have taken much policing at all to find out he was murdered.

Failure #2: Dave morphed into an extra-judicial tough cop. Instead of stakeouts, questioning, and standard police work, he graduated to beating people up to get the answers he wanted. That type of "policing" may have been a cool thing on screen in the 90's, but I'm tired of seeing it. First he beat up a pimp in a train station for answers, then he beat up the local mobster, Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni (John Goodman), for answers. I would've forgiven beating up Balboni because Dave's daughter was being held captive somewhere and Balboni could provide answers, but because he'd already established himself as the extra-judicial tough cop by this time, I saw this as more of him abusing his powers of the badge. Balboni was a mobster not a monster, he probably would've given Robicheaux the info he wanted to help him get his daughter, but Dave had been itching to bust up Balboni from the beginning.

Failure #3: The kidnapped-girl-for-trade routine. When Dave finally closed in on the killer, Murphy Doucet (Bernard Hocke), Doucet kidnapped Dave's daughter, Alafair (Alana Locke), and demanded the incriminating evidence in exchange for the girl. This was yet another 90's trope: trading a wife, daughter, or girlfriend for X. Those trades NEVER go the way they're supposed to and they are overused.

I think IEM was nothing more than a project to infuse money into post-Katrina Louisiana--which isn't a bad thing. The movie had credible names in it such as TLJ, John Goodman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ned Beatty, Kelly MacDonald, and Mary Steenburgen, but it takes more than credible names to make a credible movie. A few updates and tweaks to this and it would've been a respectable film.

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