STUDIO: The Weinstein Company
RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2008
STARRING: Richard Gere, Claire Danes, and Kadee Strickland
WRITTEN BY: Craig Mitchell & Hans Bauer
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Lau
FEATURES: None

Richard Gere had arguably his best year on-camera in 2007 and NO ONE saw it. The three movies he led - The Hoax, The Hunting Party, and The Flock - made a combined $18 million with the last film in that trifecta never even hitting theaters. It's a shame that such a once-popular actor who was also once-quite-boring gave three performances this strong and they didn't even make a ripple in the fabric of pop culture. And they display something that this actor was once accused of not having - a very impressive range. These three characters have very little in common and you could do a lot worse than scheduling all of them in a film festival. The weakest of the three movies, despite possibly containing Gere's best performance, is The Flock, a thriller that The Weinstein Company clearly had no idea how to market when it was originally scheduled to hit theaters just about a year ago. The actual thrills come out slightly muddled and ill-formed but Gere does great work that fans of his really should see. Let's hope someone sees it this time.

Gere plays Errol Babbage, a man whose job is probably much harder to bring a smile to than yours. He spends nearly every minute of his day tracking sex offenders. He visits them like a parole officer, just to make sure they're staying on their best behavior. Errol gets a little obsessed about his "flock", even going as far as to circle stories about rape and other sex crimes in the paper just in case it's one of "his people" and trying to track every movement of theirs, just to avoid another murder, rape, etc. Errol holds nothing back and the scum of the Earth that he's been forced to monitor for years have warped and damaged him. He's on the edge, which isn't the best situation for his new, wide-eyed partner (a woefully mis-cast Claire Danes). Just after introducing his new partner to his "bad cop" routine, Errol links one of his parolees to a recently missing girl and the two of them head into the seedy underworld of S&M and sex crimes to try and find her. The director of Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau, makes his English-language debut with The Flock, but the film is largely carried by Gere. The mystery doesn't quite click (and is far too obvious) and Lau doesn't seem like the right fit for this material, but it's a far superior film to a lot of the junk that did find its way into theaters last summer. How does Captivity get a nationwide release and The Flock goes straight-to-DVD? Hollywood is a mysterious place.

Thrillers always find an audience in the home market and The Flock is likely to do just that in the coming weeks. Interested viewers will find a more than competent video and audio transfer. As you might imagine, a film set in S&M dungeons needs a crystal clear video transfer on DVD and I never had trouble discerning what was happening in The Flock. The audio is slightly less impressive, but never distracting. What is distracting is the complete lack of special features, something that, like most DVD viewers, we have no patience for in today's market. With so many choices, sometimes just a bell or whistle like a deleted scene of a commentary track can enhance a movie like The Flock. Even when it comes to special features, Richard Gere can't catch a break lately.