Once again, getting removed from Netflix in September prompted me to bumping this up to the top of my bloated queue. It was a rare flick directed as well as starring the late Bill Paxton with help from fellow Texans Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe.
It begins with a troubled man named Fenton barging his way in to the FBI’s Dallas HQ to see who’s in charge of the investigation regarding the God’s Hand killer. Fenton is introduced to Agent Doyle and proceeds to explain why it’s his brother Adam. As Fenton starts explaining, the film goes back in time to when Adam and Fenton where kids living with their widowed father. Life was alright. They went to school, did chores to help around the house. Dad worked as a mechanic in a neighboring town. Nothing out of the ordinary. A typical small-town, blue-collar existence.
Then their father came home saying god spoke to him and said it was his duty to kill the demons living amongst them. Fenton being older is skeptical. Adam is onboard with dad. Maybe it’s just a phase Fenton hopes. When dad comes home with an engraved axe and a list of names, Fenton is horrified…his dad means it! They proceed to drive out to the home of the first name, a female nurse. She’s kidnapped, bound and brought to their shed. Dad even performs this weird ritual of touching the “demon” and reacting like he’s having a seizure to justify why this stranger will be executed. Paralyzed with fear, Fenton and Adam witness Dad murdering the nurse and dismembering her body to hide their crime.
Dad moves on to researching the next name on this mysterious list. Fenton tries to resist yet he’s only a kid, he’s helpless to stop the events which follow.
I’ll stop there because I recommend Frailty. Not just due to my Bill Paxton bias. The movie was a well-done thriller. The acting was first rate and Bill plays this man on a mission with an eerie normalcy. He’s not looney, maybe a tad fanatical but his murder spree has the cold calculations of a home repair operation. There’s no ritual involved like Silence of the Lambs, these are straight-forward execution-style killings of people he’s convinced are not human, they’re demons incognito. All I will say is how things play out take M Night Shyamalan to school.
Great job Bill and Powers. Besides your B-movie prowess in Tombstone and others, you two proved you had serious acting chops. That’s why y’all will be missed for years to come.