I Know Who Killed Me

Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me

Maybe because it's Lindsay Lohan's way of telling the cinematic world she's grown up now and would like to be cast in more mature roles, with her taking on dual characters here as all American rich girl next door Aubrey Fleming, and white trash stripperella Dakota Moss. Like Anne Hathaway before her who had shed her clothes to announce her arrival (in both Brokeback Mountain and Havoc), Lohan prances around in skimpy costumes, gyrating on a dance floor showing off her pole moves, but yet stopped short from showing what she has already exposed in real life.

Her public demeanours aside, which has seen her flash skin (intentional or not), smoke, drink and drive, all hopes of this movie being her vehicle to show what she can do beyond those cutesy teenage roles, go up in a puff of smoke. I Know Who Killed Me sounds like a cheap cousin of the cliched I Know What You Did (insert favrourite season here), and works out for the most parts suffering from multiple personality disorder. It cannot decide whether to be a psychological thriller which tickles the mind, a mystery with tons of smart red herrings thrown about, or a gory torture porn movie which really strayed too close into the Elisha Cuthbert Captivity copycat model.

Lohan as Aubrey disappears in a small town which had been rocked by a series of missing girls and bizarre killings. Naturally everyone gets worried that Ms Freckles will become a victim, and when she's found, she suddenly deems herself to be a certain Dakota Moss who have absolutely no idea why folks are claiming otherwise, and assisted by some nifty special effects that somehow just makes your skin crawl. So on everyone's insistence she's not who she claims she is, and going down the road of delusions, I'll actually be quite glad if it took that straightforward path, rather than meander through indecisiveness, showing a little of everything, including cheap shock horror tactics, before providing that all important plot twist to stamp its mark and steer the movie henceforth. Credit though to that twist which was something of interest to me at least, but nothing that had already not been done before.

What the story clearly lacked was a strong central villain, instead opting for the obvious cliches in playing coy with his identity. The movie throws up a whole truckload of supporting characters, and most of them, especially the police folk who were so involved in cracking the case ala CSI style, gets so conveniently forgotten midway through. Subplots introduced were relying too much on many coincidences, and when they do not logically work out, gets dropped wholesale too. All these boiled down in demonstrating the scatterbrains at work here, in dabbling with and experimenting, but leaving those unwanted test results still in the movie.

But as mentioned, I Know Who Killed Me is an avenue for Lohan to show that she's bad, and really really bad. But there's absolutely no need to show she's notorious at flirting with the gardener with her come hither looks in tight clothing. She smokes and she drinks, and doesn't demonstrate anything else beyond being the tabloid fodder she has made out to be in recent times. Watch this if only you enjoy being teased by the local distributors - violence and gore is good and uncut, but love making with clothes on gets the snip for the call of the dough.