Mr Brooks is a highly excellent psychological thriller starring Kevin Costner. This is easily Kevin Costner's darkest movie, it is also one of his best performances on screen to date. Costner is Earl Brooks, a wealthy and successful businessman that loves his family, but has a dark secret and has a compulsive habit of murdering people. He is meticulous in his methods and very efficient and smart about what he is doing. This is a highly engrossing and rich film with excellent character development and story. Kevin Costner gives an Oscar worthy performance in this very well made and original film. William Hurt is equally impressive as his alter ego and has great chemistry with Costner. Demi Moore and Dane Cook also give good performances. The film has a few plot twists and the right amount of dark humor, as a whole the film is very engrossing and interesting, but flows very well. Anybody struggling with addiction(or former addict) will find this film easily relate able and truthful in the films approach to the subject. In my opinion, Mr. Brooks is very underated and easily the best thriller to come out of Hollywood since Seven.

Kevin Costner plays a "cold as ice" schizophrenic psychopathic serial killer Earl Brooks in this intriguing thriller. It is several stories wrapped into one. The story of the main character who has an invisible "friend" who talks him into killing people.Then you have an insane photographer who is blackmailing Mr. Brooks into letting him tag along to watch a killing up close. Demi Moore plays a"bad ass" cop who became a cop to prove herself to her uber rich father. Then there is an escaped con who has it in for Demi & is completely out of his mind wanting to get revenge for her putting him in prison. After all of that Mr. Brooks has to cover up a murder his daughter committed in college. After all of this you have a lot of blood, a lot of killing, a lot of intrigue & a lot of creepy fun. There are even a few laughs along the way. I rate it a 4/5 or 8/10

OK, I think this is the closest that you could ever come to seeing and meeting a real life serial killer in all his perverse psychology on display. Kevin Costner is outstanding in his portrayal of Mr. Brooks, a seemingly solid citizen and nice guy with a seriously evil and twisted side to him. The whole fractured psyche shown, with the invention of an imaginary alter ego that pushes him to commit atrocious murders, looks like a very true-to-life scenario of a split personality, the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome. The depiction of how the tension and frustration and excitement build in between the kills, till the killer trips and bursts through the nice guy persona is chilling and effective. However, even though I found the whole genetic basis of twisted psychopathic behavior to be an exceedingly intriguing premise, I am not so sure about a killing gene expressing itself so floridly, especially in a female, as female serial killers are so far and few in between in history and most could not be related back to a genetic basis. Still, this is one good, scary and original take on the whole serial killer genre. Watch it!!

"Mr. Brooks" thinks it is darker and edgier than it actually is. Like most films in the serial killer thriller genre, it's a bit lazy, coasting on unlikely plot twists and providing few genuine scares. The filmmakers could have tried a lot harder. There is one thing that sets it apart from the straight-to-DVD slasher fare that chokes the genre, however: top-notch performances from actors who aren't usually known for them.Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a respected business owner and family man. He's also a serial killer who murders couples while they're having sex. (Everybody needs a hobby.) He has abstained from murder for two years, but his homicidal urges creep back up in the form of Marshall (William Hurt), his imaginary, bloodthirsty alter ego. Brooks gives in and commits another murder, only to be caught on film by a peeping tom named "Mr. Smith" (Dane Cook) who blackmails Brooks into making him his "protegé". Meanwhile, Detective Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) reopens the investigation into Brooks' murders, and the cat and mouse games ensue.All the elements of a serial killer movie are here: the driven but troubled cop, the painstaking attention paid to the killer's M.O., the far-fetched plot twists. It's all here, and it's all a bit predictable. We see a lot of it coming a mile away, and the plot twist that ties the ending together is far too convenient to be believed. The movie is also loaded down with unnecessary subplots: the 45 minutes or so spent on Atwood's divorce and Brooks' troubled daughter (Danielle Panabaker) do nothing but get in the way. Another, small complaint: it's set in Portland, Oregon, but was obviously neither filmed there nor made by people who have been there. As a longtime resident of the City of Roses, I know that the Cup and Saucer is in Southeast, not downtown, and that a high-speed chase on the Ross Island Bridge in the middle of the day is a logistical impossibility. "Mr. Brooks"' saving grace is the acting. Costner is wonderful as Brooks. Most actors playing serial killers resort to imitating Hannibal Lecter, but Costner plays Brooks as an ordinary man with a darkness inside that he doesn't like; he's a murder addict who desperately wants to get sober. Moore takes the stock "tough cop" character and makes her smart, likable and funny, someone we might want to hang out with. Hurt gives his best performance in years as the gleefully malevolent Marshall, relishing murder and mayhem as if it were the best steak he's ever had. Dane Cook is his usual lowbrow, irritating self - which is just right for his character. I don't know if he's doing it on purpose, but he's perfectly convincing as a perverted sleaze. All of these actors have spent most of their careers giving fair-to-middling performances in mediocre movies; here, they give great performances in a fair-to-middling movie. Good as the acting as, however, it's just not enough. The plot is too tired, the direction too uninspired, the story just too dull.In a way, "Mr. Brooks" is not to blame for its faults - it simply got to the party too late. The serial killer film genre ran out of steam years ago; after reaching the high-water mark with "Silence of the Lambs", it petered out into a steady trickle of pedestrian slasher films. There's nothing left in the well to draw from. Given that the average serial killer movie is so lousy, "Mr. Brooks" is not that bad in comparison. While it could have been better, it could easily have been much worse.