‘Boneyard’ review: Serial killer thriller a cut above the average B-movie
The sad reality of our world and our nation is that we have had so many notorious serial killings and mass murders in the 20th and 21st centuries that unless you’re a resident of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, region, you might not have even heard of the West Mesa murders. In 2009, a woman walking her dog found a bone in an undeveloped area in Albuquerque that is part of the elevated landmass known as the West Mesa and alerted authorities, who discovered the remains of 11 women and girls and a fetus. The girls and women, all of whom disappeared between 2001 and 2005, were between the ages of 15 and 32.
Those unsolved murders serve as the inspiration for director and co-writer Asif Akbar’s gritty and stylish if occasionally meandering and overstuffed “Boneyard.” While the film is faithful to the basic factual outlines of the case, it is a work of fiction with characters who are not based on any true-life investigators or suspects. This is a B-movie through and through, but thanks in large part to a deep cast of familiar faces and reliable character actors, it’s a solid crime thriller that respects the true-life blueprint of the story.
Mel Gibson, who has reached that point in his career where he’s churning out three or four relatively low-profile films a year and is usually playing a bearded, cynical, world-weary guy living in a world of violence, checks off all those boxes here as the federal profiler Agent Petrovick, who insists everyone calls him Pete.
As is typically the case in these types of crime movies, the local investigators, including Detectives Ortega (Brian Van Holt) and Young (Nora Zehetner) resent the feds. What’s the deal with this cocky old-timer who wears Hawaiian shirts and sucks the air out of the room? Of course, they eventually come to respect Pete’s methodology. The guy knows what he’s doing.
Director Akbar and cinematographer Joshua Reis sometimes use a hand-held, indie style and occasionally switch to sepia tones and black-and-white as the story expands this way and that, sometimes to the detriment of the main plot. Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson’s Chief Carter is dealing with corruption in the department, notably from a rogue former undercover cop named Tate (Michael Sirow) who might be connected to the killings. Gabrielle Haugh does fine work as Selena, a sex worker who might have some evidence to help break the case. In a handful of scenes that play like a lesser version of “The Silence of the Lambs,” a creepy loner played by Weston Cage (son of Nicolas Cage) emerges as a prime suspect.
As “Boneyard” embraces crime thriller tropes, e.g., The Big Board of Clues, with photos and index cards and newspaper headlines connected by a web of red string, Gibson’s Pete narrates the story, at one point noting that he, Detective Ortega and Chief Carter all have lost loved ones to violent crime: “What a crew we are. The walking wounded. Each of us carrying the ghosts of the ones we were supposed to protect. They were dead, and we were alive, and we couldn’t forgive ourselves for that.” It’s the stuff of clichés, but also the stuff we kind of expect in movies like this, and it works more often than not.