People are voting emotionally.

Great Film overall

Excellent but underrated film

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Despite that this should be by now ordinary to me, I continually become amazed when the mainstream American movie industry panders with amazingly clinging loyalty to the the American public their tendency to fanaticize and obsess over the obscene. To translate...When discussing the grotesque and the macabre, abuse, torture and destruction of human life, we become most fascinated when such things are done in a bizarre fashion. Of course, it only profits to connect the dots of this fascination to the fetishists. I can't specify enough not only how incorrect, but how harmful this is.I understand how disgusting the American public must find the idea of S/M, BDSM, and Fetishism. That being said, it is blissfully unaware of the simple difference between people who consensually engage in such acts and those individuals that enjoy abusing victims without any permission to do so. It sounds so simple, yet is so essential - at every moment in the movie the berated and obsessed yet righteous agent "uncovers" how his hapless clients like to abuse and sometimes kill women. The fetishists are intermingled with men who mutilate, rape, and kill women. This is beyond cheap - this is discrimination.There is a large difference between a woman who wants to be bound and whipped and a man who is doing this to her, and a man who likes to do this to women who don't want it. Sadism is a term misused - there is a DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ODD SEXUAL ACTS AND ABUSIVE CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR. This movie is an insult to the first amendment rights of every American citizen. That being said, this movie breeds ignorance of this. People who engage in S/M are not child molesters and rapists. Sometimes molesters and rapists may like some of the S/M pornographic material. However, there are many individuals who engage in S/M, and they have no prior abuse records, no troubled childhoods, and have no intention to harm anyone who doesn't specifically request and agree to it. Yes, masochists find sadists, indeed, need sadists, as the other half of their happy perverse existence. Neither breaks the law. Particularly annoying was when the agent had a consensual couple in public this time, leaving it very difficult for him to go on his violent paranoid rant, so he chose to annoy and harass them instead, who basically told him to go and sit on it. So, basically, according to this movie, any abnormal sexual behavior will be persecuted by the state. What I'd like to know is, what is the point of this people's jobs? And what are they saying about our rights?

Now, I will be prejudiced going in as the director Wai-keung Lau is the director of three of my favorite films - the Infernal Affairs trilogy. That means I am expecting some real excitement out of Richard Gere and Claire Danes.We enter the world of the sick and twisted, which Erroll (Gere) and Allison (Danes) watch after they are released from prison. It serves no purpose to list the perversions; you wouldn't believe me anyway, and need to see for yourself.Gere was excellent as usual, but there wasn't enough action in this film to justify having Wai-keung Lau direct. It turned out to be a standard police procedural looking for serial killers. Danes was a waste.

A worker responsible for monitoring sex offenders is close to retirement after years in the job; what he has experienced puts him on the brink of insanity, perhaps into the abyss of madness when for his last case he goes in search of a missing teenage girl. That is the central tale of this movie and the lead actor does superbly in his role with an equally impressive performance from the actress playing the rookie he is training to take over his position.However this film is more or less ruined by two things:1. The massively irritating and quirky way the film is directed and presented which dilutes and in effect destroys the first rate acting of the leads and obscures the story considerably. Hence a prime example of how the ego/interference of a director etc spoils an otherwise good show.Furthermore, the other negative,2. As indeed another reviewer noted: the picture appears to be an attempted copy in many respects of X-Files('X files without the X') right down to the similarity to the two "stars" of that show being in effect cloned into this film. Therefore what otherwise might have received a 7 or even an 8 from me is reduced by several grades due to the fatal flaws herein outlined.5/10.

Gere and Danes star as 2 workers for the department of public safety who keep track of released sex offenders. Gere, who plays Babbage, refers to them as his flock. Gere is an over obsessed vigilante whom is on his way out. He is training, new comer Allison, to take over his job. Gere sees his flock as very sick, disturbed puppies. He asks them questions that are not on the list, and tries to act like the police and solve crimes. He keeps getting warned for this behavior, hence the reason he is being replaced. During his final few days on the job, a young girl goes missing, and Babbage is sure it is one of his flock whom has gone astray. Him and Allison narrow a list down and discover some of the offenders have gone AWOL. So, he decides that he needs to track the missing girl down rather than help the police. That part is a little far fetched.There is some sick, twisted stuff shown in this film. Like when Babbage and Allison go to this building where a bunch of sick people do disturbing things to each other. Also, there are the people who kidnapped the girl. At the end of the film, we see what sick freaks they are. However, I wouldn't call this movie excessive because not really much is shown on film.FINAL VERDICT: If you like thrillers and films about serial killers and cops chasing killers, then you will like this.