So much average

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

For the past decade, I've heard great things about Brigham City, but I've been very hesitant to see it. Aside from having a mostly unknown cast, the film was written, directed, produced, and starred Richard Dutcher, who created a production company called Mormon Cinema, which only makes Mormon related films. I have found that when a film comes from such a strong religious backing, that it usual has a preachy agenda, and tends to focus more on religion than anything else, but to my surprise, Brigham City does not. The film does takes place in a Mormon community, all the characters are Moron, and there is a religious angel to the film, that includes several scenes in the church, which were slow, but thankfully not overwhelming. The story centers around this small religious community in Utah, that is suddenly rocked by a series of murders. Dutcher, plays the sheriff, a highly respect, deeply religious man, grieving for the loss of his family. His town has always been a paradise and has never faced anything like this before, so the sheriff needs to come up with some pretty interesting ways to catch the killer. Dutcher was excellent in his role, after all he wrote it, and who else is better equipped to play such a role? What I really liked was how different the story was, this wasn't just your typical manhunt for a killer on the loose, there were many different facets to this film that made it unique. What gave Brigham City it's fourth star was the amazing twist at the end that no one will see coming. I've seen a lot of films like this and 9 times out of 10, I have the killer pegged before they are revealed, but this film complete blindsided me, which proves to be just another example of clever it is. Yes, there is some religion and yes much of the cast in unknown, but I found this film to be fascinating. Brigham City had me captivated and on the edge of my seat, but most important of all it made me think and managed to really surprise me.

For a gentile like myself, Brigham City is both a good murder mystery about a serial killer and a nice insight into a community where the Mormon culture predominates. The film is the creation of Richard Dutcher who wrote, directed, and starred in it.Dutcher wears two hats in this film and something you're not likely to see in a gentile setting. He's both the bishop and spiritual leader of the town and the sheriff. Being that must be a unique experience, in most small town the function of the local cops is mainly breaking up bar fights and writing speeding tickets. As one of the tenets of the LDS church is non-imbibing of liquor that is something he might not have to deal with. Still Dutcher and his deputy Matthew Brown do have an influx of other kinds of people in the town engaged in the construction trade. The place is booming.And so when a serial killer strikes the folks in Brigham City find it inconceivable that the perpetrator could be one of them. Eventually they have to explore the possibility.When a young girl goes missing, Dutcher deputizes a bunch of people and they do a house to house search which in another setting somebody might complain about a little thing like the Constitution. He does uncover a wrongdoer, but not in the same vein of what he was looking for.I did like the scenes very much of the everyday life in a Mormon community it gives some great insights. For instance Brown talks about saving money for various things including the mission trip his infant son will eventually make. Not something you would hear in another film.Dutcher is an imaginative film maker and he's turned out a good one here that can be appreciated outside the state of Utah.

My wife and I watched this movie last night and we're still talking about it. We are both Mormon so we'd heard of the movie but had no idea what it was about. We were very pleasantly surprised. Whatever your religious persuasion, you will enjoy this movie. It certainly did a good job of portraying a Mormon community and along the way I wondered why they kept showing intimate details of our faith, but at the end it all came together as each element was important for the plot to fully play out. Perhaps my expectations were low after seeing God's Army a few years ago, but I thought Dutcher did a great job weaving the characters and the plot together and the suspense is simply fantastic. I give it a 3.5 out of 4 - I'd give it a 4 if there were professional actors, but it nearly deserves a 4 anyway. The acting actually was very good.

Brigham's sheriff -- a terribly sad, but extremely decent man -- is forced to admit that there is a serial killer in his small, friendly, pretty little town. He sets about looking for the killer from what appears to be a hopelessly blinkered perspective, refusing to believe that anyone but an "outsider" could be responsible. He gradually finds his way to the answer, and it hurts to watch. I could happily see a film by this director every day of the week. This was absolutely brilliantly done -- such a nice change from all the crash and bash of more typical overacted, overplotted, punctuated-by-explosions movies. Dutcher gives the lie to the idea that movie characters (especially the police) need to be wisecracking, high-octane, postmodern cardboard cutouts in order to solve a crime. It's a rare example, too, of a film filled with deeply religious people who are not simply a bunch of flakes.