What have you done to us Kaiser Sose? With director Neil Lebovitz’s new film ‘Tortured’ we have another entry into that ‘Usual Suspects’ lexicon of films where we have some mysterious super badass criminal mastermind in the background pulling the strings and making things happen. The question, naturally, while watching this and similar movies is exactly who is this criminal mastermind? Have we met him yet or is he somewhere off stage? And when he is finally revealed will it make a lick of damn sense and will we care? ‘Tortured’ really does give it its best shot, but ultimately this slick looking criminal exercise crumbles under the weight of its own lofty ambitions.

Jimmy Vaughn (Cole Hauser) is a brutal henchman working for the international criminal mastermind who we only hear from in voice altered phone calls, and goes by the name of ‘Ziggy’. As our film begins, Jimmy is in a run of mill suburban home with some other vicious henchman when he gets the call to go in the secret safe room in the back of the house. In that room, looking scared out his mind, is a rather mild mannered looking man named Archie Green (Laurence Fishburne). It seems that Archie Green has foolishly stolen ten million dollars from Ziggy and it’s Jimmy’s job to ‘convince’ Archie, using the various tools that Jimmy has at his disposal, to tell him where he has stashed the missing loot.

Jimmy Vaughn is actually FBI agent Kevin Cole who is deep undercover in an effort to root out the mysterious Ziggy and finally bring him to justice. Kevin Cole is the son of noted FBI chief Jack Cole (James Cromwell) who would prefer his son not be in the middle of this beyond dangerous mission, but Kevin has quite the chip on his shoulder and wants the world to know that he garners no special treatment from his old man. Besides, even Jack Cole failed to bring Ziggy down when he had the chance, instead accidentally killing his young daughter in their big raid back in the day, thus giving Kevin the chance to one-up his bitter old man who won’t stay out of his freaking business.

Back and forth our agent goes from being Jimmy Vaughn, who is escalating his torture of Archie Green who continually maintains his innocence, then back to Kevin Cole, FBI agent with the hot girlfriend Becky (Emmanuelle Chiriqui) and their increasingly fractured relationship, and not to mention the father that he is unable to please. Though Jimmy Vaughn has been dutifully carrying out the increasingly violent orders from Ziggy, eventually Ziggy makes some demands that makes the already blurry line separating FBI agent Kevin Cole and thug Jimmy Vaughn even blurrier. And when this all finally comes to a head all that you thought you knew won’t anything near what the truth is, and it will shock you… at least in theory.

So whenever a film bypasses a theatrical release and goes Direct to DVD, as tortured has, many immediately assume that the film must be crap. This isn’t always the case, and I don’t say this simply because I’m a big consumer of Direct to DVD movies. Probably more times than not, the film simply isn’t marketable enough to warrant a theatrical push and I believe this is the case with ‘Tortured’. Even though I think ‘Tortured’ falters in its third act, and falters badly, it was still a very watchable film with high production values and some solid performances and is squarely in the genre of the kind of movie that I prefer. Cole Hauser is a good looking kid with some talent, but he has yet to prove himself as a leading man capable of carrying an entire film from start to finish. Here Hauser gives a solid performance as the dual characters of Jimmy Vaughn and Kevin Cole, but the rather weak script lacks depth and doesn’t give the actor enough to work with. It seemed they tried to beef up the character with the whole girlfriend angle, but my question would be, if one is going undercover in major crime organization, shouldn’t this dude be COMPLETELY undercover? Should this undercover agent over go home to his girlfriend and his regular life every night, make frequent trips to the FBI office and go to high profile Black Tie dinner events with his FBI Director father? I’m thinking no, but I’ve never been an undercover FBI agent so how the hell would I know? You’re going to be hard pressed to find two better supporting actors than James Cromwell and Laurence Fishburne who were very good in their respective roles considering what each actor was asked to do, but even actors of their pedigree could not rescue the third act which ultimately sinks the film.

The thing is that a film like this, at least the way that this one plays out with a narrative that’s already fairly suspect to begin with, rests completely on it’s ‘twist’ to take it to the finish line. Though a lot of effort was put into making the surprise ending as effective as possible it still wasn’t much of a surprise and without giving anything away, it would seem that the lengths that this unknown Ziggy character went to execute our little twisted ending seemed unnecessarily elaborate. But not satisfied to leave well enough alone, it gets even twistier! But you’re going to have to experience all that twistiness for yourself because I’m not going to be the one who spoils it for you.

Despite the fact that ‘Tortured’ wasn’t a very good movie, it’s hard for me to crap on it too hard because it is the kind of film I enjoy watching, and it certainly had its moments that kept me riveted. It also had a very accomplished cast, was well paced and had a stylish look and top notch presentation. The film’s flaws were pretty glaring though and thus it was ultimately impossible for the movie to conquer them. This is too bad because at its core there’s a pretty good movie buried underneath all that twisty behavior.