Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Screw what anyone says about movies where everything is not about action, 'cause this is a very very good film. I don't know the first thing about what a good cameraman is supposed to do or what good special effects are (if there even are in this one), but I look at the big picture and that must count for something. The acting is good, natural, down to earth, the atmosphere is a bit cold, distant and autistic. But that made the whole movie worth watching it, I thought, and the absence (finally!) of any wild romance or crazy love made it a big Hansaplast on a bleeding wound. Really. If you have lost hope in Hollywood, see this.

The lead actor, Scott Wolf, gives a compelling performance as a detective who believes he will die of a terminal and painful illness. He orders a "hit" on himself from a stranger only to discover the diagnosis was wrong. That would have been a fairly good story, but the rest of the movie falls apart by some rather dumb and nonsensical sub-plots and a poor and ludicrous performance from the grossly over-rated Tim Roth. Do not understand why film-makers when they have an interesting plot spoil it by both over complicating the story line and introducing silly scenes.5 out of 10.

Spoiler Alert!! Hmmm...interesting movie. I've just spent some 12 hours watching "Emmett's Mark" from start to finish, from finish to start, in between, backwards and forwards, in slow-mo, in zoom X 4, and also the deleted scenes. And, I still haven't got a darn clue 'who done it'!! My Girlfriend and I are both avid movie watchers and, despite what some people might say, we are generally not devoid of brain cells. But... WHO DONE IT??!?!. Reading other comments of this flick, along with those for it's alias "Killing Emmett Young" in other parts of the world, the ending appears to be regarded as more or less open-ended. Here are some of the things that have kept us guessing :They seem to refer to the patches of skin missing where tattoo's had been removed from the victims' bodies as 'bruised tissue'. This seems to imply a softer aspect of something which is quite blatant and obvious corpse mutilation, and would in all likelyhood be picked up on much earlier than at the end when Emmett happened across a tattoo studio.It would appear that there are 2 plots running in the movie - that's fine. But the ending seemed to leave more questions than it answered. Who was the serial killer? If it was Dwyer, the movie would have ended when he died and handed over the phone message note with Alison's recall of having been at "Vic's". Was Dwyer the serial killer, or just a lonely man who relied on his porn to get him through his moments of sexual frustration? How did Emmett actually get to talk to Dwyer's lady friend, Suzanne, if she was the person referred to as the 'anonymous tip'? Who was the guy Emmett staked out in the park and was this guy doing perverse things under his coat and filming it? Why didn't Emmett take a shot at him as the suspect fled? (not a big ask in America these days).Emmett is supposedly a smart and observant profiler-cop, yet he didn't notice Dwyer standing closely behind him and staring intensely at him in the music store, nor did he hear Dwyer's pager beep just as he was crossing the road to drill Emmett full of lead. He also seems to have missed Dwyer fishing out a rather large wad of bills from his pocket as he looked for his keys. Yet he did notice that Dwyer had stuffed all his sordid things in a cupboard, which he left open. Hmmm...and where did that large aquarium thing in the left corner of the lounge disappear to?Did Suzanne rat Dwyer out after she saw what she considered gross porn and junk lying all around his apartment? Oddly enough, his apartment seemed to go through varying phases from tidy to abjectly disgraceful. The door knob to Dwyer's apartment also had me intrigued. When Suzanne tried the door, it was unlocked and the inner door knob fell on the floor. She merely popped it back into position rather than screw it back properly. Later, when Dwyer returned, the door knob was properly affixed.Having reviewed the shoot-through-the-door scene in close-up and slow-mo, Emmett sustains a gun-shot graze to the upper right eye area, yet the bullets came through the left side of the peep-hole and above. Why did Emmett bolt straight for the bedroom to his personal revolver instead of going directly to the drawer where he had just retired his service automatic? Both Emmett's personal revolver, and the one Dwyer got from Bracken appear to have been 4-inch nickel-plated Colt Python's. Maybe that was just to send us into a tail-spin, but Dwyer appeared to replace Emmett's Colt *and* the ammunition back into the little tool-box he used to store it in his cupboard earlier on. When Emmett was finally forced to use his revolver, the speed-loader was gone, and the packet of cartridges was still there, but empty. We saw a speed loader and a similar packet of cartridges in Dwyer's apartment when Suzanne stumbled in while someone was in the shower (presumably Dwyer, getting ready for his date with her).Dwyer had the chance to finish Emmett off, but he chose not to. Was it because he thought it was game-over and Emmett had nailed him for Bracken's murder and/or the serial killings, or just that deep down he was not really a cold blooded killer? (apart from beating both a former Junior Officer and Bracken to death - though Bracken seemed to have used the "you're a nothing, never will be, and I helped you get acquitted so you owe me" on Dwyer once too often. Plus, he didn't pay him).A crucial piece of dialogue was fast and mumbled when Emmett met Millstat between the latest abductee's front door and the squad car. Something like 'Mills Lake moth/mum'. Plus the reference to a 'dark SUV', which I'm guessing is something like a 4 Wheel Drive? (hmmm... Emmett just happened to drive a similar car - could it have been him all along?).Oh, and why did Emmett only read the case-breaking note after his convalescence?Lots of unanswered questions, but all in all, an enjoyable movie, but the ending seemed too open and rather rushed. Perhaps that's what Keith Snyder had planned all along?

1st watched 3/28/2004 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Keith Snyder): Unique but slow moving drama about a detective who is only given one week to live and hires someone to kill him so that he won't go out slowly. Another story within this central theme, is the serial killer that he's tracking down but we really don't get shown much of this side of the story. Scott Wolf does a good job in his role as the detective but when a twist in the story occurs and he decides he doesn't want to be killed, the movie just doesn't go anywhere. A very flat performance by Tim Roth in the role of the assassin doesn't help the story much, and Gabriel Byrne really doesn't do much with his role as the person Wolf works thru to get the killing done. All in all this was a good try at a different kind of thriller but there's not enough heart going into the making of this. There were some obvious small things like editing mistakes that made it clear that not a lot work was put into finishing this but instead it was just put on the movie shelves as soon as it could.