The ludicrous thriller Pathology was scripted by Mark
Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the writing team responsible for the (literally) adrenaline-fueled Speed
knock-off Crank,
and based on those two efforts, they're on the cutting edge of high-concept
pulp sleaze. This isn't an insult. Neither film works quite as well as it
should—perhaps a problem their next effort, which they co-directed, will
solve—but Neveldine and Taylor have a knack for nutso conceits that
aren't easily forgotten. It's impossible to talk about their movies without
chuckling a little, and when discussing genre trash, that isn't a bad start.
Pathology opens with a sober reveal
of the Hippocratic Oath, which is presented as one of those rules that's meant
to be broken. Top of his class at Harvard—a designation that all hotshot
young doctors and lawyers in the movies seem to share—Milo Ventimiglia
joins a group of student forensic pathologists at a prestigious Washington, DC
hospital. People who spend a lot of time around corpses tend to have a dark
side, but Ventimiglia soon discovers that these interns are considerably darker
than most. Headed by sinister ringleader Michael Weston, half a dozen student
pathologists are part of an after-hours club that could be called the Dead
People's Society. Using an abandoned section of the hospital as a meeting
place, they take turns killing people in elaborate ways and challenging the
group to figure out how exactly they did it. Not quite the straight-arrow he
appears to be, Ventimiglia gets roped into their macabre game, assured that the
victims are deserving ones, like child molesters or pimps.
There are a lot of
diabolically clever ideas at play in Pathology, but Ventimiglia and
director Marc Schoelermann snuff them out by treating the material gravely when
they should be turning up the volume. As an actor, Ventimiglia (Rocky Balboa, TV's Heroes) seems incapable of
having any fun, but here, he's playing a character who's on vacation from his
conscience; after his residency is over, he can get on with his buttoned-down
life as if nothing ever happened, but even a kinky, Body Of Evidence-like fling with a fellow
doctor (Lauren Lee Smith) leaves him stone-faced. For his part, Schoelermann
misses the satirical possibilities of a premise that's the ultimate testament
to the arrogant detachment of the medical profession. Neither of them seems to
realize that their movie is fundamentally—and at times
gloriously—ridiculous, but much like Crank, it's the guiltiest of
guilty pleasures anyway.