THR3E (review)
Some sins were never meant to be discovered.
From the highly acclaimed book by best-selling author Ted Dekker, this taut and electrifying thriller about a young seminary student targeted by an elusive and deadly madman delivers heart-pounding twists that’ll keep you guessing up until the shocking final scene!
Upon completing his graduate thesis, Kevin Parson is forced to face his own dark past when he is targeted by the psychopathic Riddle Killer. Following a terrifying encounter, in which he is given seconds to “confess his sin” before his car is blown sky-high, Kevin meets up with a criminal psychologist whose brother was killed in a similarly explosive confrontation. Together they must solve Kevin’s mystifying riddle and uncover his connection to the murderer before he strikes again. But the closer they get, the more twisted the path becomes!
- THR3E (2006)
Okay, well here’s the twist. We find out that, that the killer really suffers from multiple personality disorder, right? See, he’s actually really the cop and the girl. All of them are him. Isn’t that fucked up?
So, would you show it to your agent? It’s called “The Three”.
- Adaptation (2002)
There’s no way they turned “The Three” into an actual movie. No way, uh-uh, no siree. Nobody could be that stupid.
Could they?
The movie opens with a shot of a woman running down the street and yelling into a cell phone. Apparently, the man on the other end of the line has kidnapped her brother, and she’s desperately asking him where he’s holding him. “He lives, but without a life. He lives in a closet, an antisocial loner with a love of gadgets.” the man replies. The mysterious phone man appears to be telling her that her brother is a homosexual nerd, but it turns out he’s just reading a blurb about himself out of a biography called Killing Mind. The author of the book just happens to be the woman he’s talking to over the phone. This woman, Jennifer, tries to tell him that what she wrote in the book was wrong, and that he’s actually quite the smart and outstanding guy, but mysterious phone man doesn’t seem to believe her. That’s because he’s the mysterious (I’ll be using this word a lot) Riddle Killer, or as the police call him, RK. Really. If you want to know how weird this sounds, imagine if everyone in Zodiac refereed to the Zodiac Killer as ZK. “I wasn’t writing about you!” Jennifer protests, apparently under the impression that RK doesn’t understand the concept of “biography”. Anyway, Riddle Killer offers up his first riddle of the movie. This is his big intro, his way of showing us in the audience just how twistedly evil and genius and fearsome he is. He gives her 90 seconds to solve his brilliant riddle. 
“How do you raise an attack dog?” he asks, “The answer is right in front of you!” Jennifer looks directly ahead and sees a hot dog cart with a picture of a dog on it. Yes, that is how genius our villain is. This is precise moment that the film tells you to abandon all hope. Time: one minute, seventeen seconds. Hold on tight, folks, this one’s going to be painful.
Jennifer races to the cart, where the vendor tells her some guy dropped off a copy of her own book earlier in the day. He recognized her easily because the picture on the cover of the book, a biography about the Riddle Killer, is… Jennifer. Maybe she’s the Danielle Steele of “true crime”. She flips open to the exact page that RK was reading from, and finishes the paragraph he was reading: “You raise an attack dog alone as a puppy. You beat it for a reason, and give it a biscuit when it bites.” Deep. Jennifer realizes exactly where her brother is being held: in the bakery right behind her. You probably already guessed this, but she’s a brilliant police investigator, and we’re seeing her mighty detective brain firing on all cylinders right now. She races over to the window (which has “FOREVER OUT OF REACH” painted on the window in spooooky black paint) and sees a blue Volkswagen Beetle parked in the middle of the empty store. 
Inside the car is her brother, duct taped to the steering wheel. Apparently no one passing by the store in the last few hours has found this suspicious in any way. She gets to the car with 30 seconds left. We know this because there’s a bomb in the car with her brother, and it has the flashing LED display and piercing beep that all movie bombs come standard with. One door will open, and the other will blow up the car, and Jennifer has to make a guess on which door is which so she can get in and diffuse the bomb with the nine seconds she has left on the clock. Making a 50/50 guess is not really a riddle, but neither was the attack dog/dog logo/hot dog thing from 81 seconds ago, so we’ll let it pass. Carefully weighing her options between opening the driver side door or the passenger side door, Jennifer instead decides to open neither door. Stunningly, this has no effect, and the bomb explodes, successfully netting our killer his one and only kill of the movie. This is our introduction to our villain and one of our heroes, and it leaves us with the indelible impression that both of them are total fucking clods. RK is a poor man’s Jigsaw, and Jennifer (the brilliant detective) has no qualms about standing next to an exploding car. Fortunately, she survives with only a broken arm. Normally I’m all for killing off the dipshit secondary characters who seem to go out of their way to get themselves killed, but Jennifer is just so spectacularly stupid that she becomes the highlight of the movie. Unfortunately, she’s not our main character. We’ll meet him in the next scene.
The film cuts to 3 months later. We are informed this via white text on a black screen. We’re also helpfully informed that this is Day 1, which completely ignores the fact that since three months have passed since the opening of the movie, this should actually be day 94. UNLESS IT’S A CLUE. We’re now at a seminary, and this is probably a good time to mention that this film was actually produced by Fox Faith, the even more hardcore right-wing Christian arm of Fox. Yes, this movie is a bible-thumper, in the sense that Go-God-Go dialogue is awkwardly crammed into characters mouths at completely inappropriate and nonsensical times. This movie just keeps getting better and better. Anyway, our hero, Kevin, and his 
violently blonde haired pal Henry, are taking a post-secondary class on the nature of good and evil. We know that Kevin is a genius because he corrects the teacher on the dates Immanuel Kant wrote his major works. Every movie taking place in a post-secondary institution is required to have a scene early on where a student corrects the teacher, and this movie goes out of its way to embrace every single movie cliché it can. After class, Kevin and his teacher talk about Kevin’s writers block on his thesis paper. My guess is that his problem is that he’s writing the entire thing by typewriter and it appears to be about forty thousand pages long. Editing that thing must be a bitch. Kevin gets into his car and goes for a drive, not noticing that RK has spray painted a spooooky message on the side of his car in neon pink paint. How he does this in the middle of a busy seminary parking lot without arousing suspicion is left to our imagination. Driving away, Kevin gets a call from RK (on a mysterious phone hidden under his armrest), who tells him he has three minutes to confess his sin before he blows his car up. That’s pretty generous coming from a guy who gave a woman nine seconds to disarm a bomb. “What falls but never breaks? 
What breaks but never falls?” RK asks. Kevin responds to his riddle in a similar way to Jennifer – he immediately gives up, crashes into a dumpster, and flees across the street. He sees the bright pink CONFESS moments before his car explodes in a fireball that makes the Hindenberg look like a firecracker. RK seems to be watching from a wind
ow approximately ten feet from the car. “Liar!” he yells to no one in particular, and proceeds to do a hobbled shuffle through a dark doorway as if he really has to pee but there’s somebody in the bathroom. RK is played by Bill Moseley in a Leatherface mask that apparently has a Jigsaw 
voice changer hidden under it. Why he puts on a mask to talk over the phone is never really explained. Maybe the voice changer came with the mask. Still, I have to give props to a movie that can cast Bill Moseley as a notorious serial killer based around two other iconic movie serial killers, and still have him come off as completely non-threatening.
Kevin is now being interrogated by the police. They don’t believe his story since they never found the mystery phone, but considering the size of the explosion I’m surprised they were even able to find the car. “You’ve heard of RK, right?” asks Black Cop. Kevin shakes his head no. “The Riddle Killer?” says White Cop helpfully, because RK is an abbreviation the only the cops use, and Kevin is supposed to know obscure police lingo somehow. We see that Jennifer is watching from the other side of the one-way glass. The two dumbass police ask him if he’s done anything to make any enemies, which gets us a close-up on Kevin’s face at he looks upwards and we get a spooooooky music cue. Kevin then tells the cops everything. Of course I’m joking, because we need to spend the next hour being jerked around because Kevin won’t say the one thing that will blow the case wide open. Kevin is an asshole. The only information we learn is that Kevin’s parents were killed many years ago in a car accident and that he was raised by his Aunt. Could this car accident be related in some way to the fact that both of RK’s attacks so far have involved car bombs? The answer is: nope, none whatsoever. So much for that. Kevin lives off of his parent’s life insurance, has no job, and is a full-time student. Needless to say, his apartment is a ridiculously huge, well furnished loft, especially for someone who lives alone. That’s got to be a hell of an insurance package. Fortunately, that theology degree he’s going for (at a seminary, no less) will uphold his lavish lifestyle, especially combined with his English major. Way to go, Kev! As the interrogation continues, Jennifer looks over some case information, including pictures of her brother, which is sort of a conflict of interest, but whatever. We get to see just what kind of damage that car bomb did to her – one of her hands is partially wrapped in a bandage. Good thing she was standing almost two feet from the car when it exploded! Jennifer then goes into her “detective voice”, which she’ll use whenever she needs to sound detective-y and mysterious. Basically, it’s a whisper that makes her sound like Liv Tyler from Lord of the Rings. “The question we should be asking,” whispers Arwen, “is why is Kevin Parson still alive?” Probably because he gave up, crashed his car, and fled in the opposite direction the moment he was in the slightest bit of danger. OR MAYBE IT’S A CLUE. Kevin has a flashback to an empty swing set. This is the start of us learning Kevin’s horrible secret – it has something to do with him as a kid. RK really holds a grudge. We’re going to be getting tiny, aggravating flashbacks like this for almost the entire first half of the movie.
Now the cops are searching Kevin’s apartment for no apparent reason. They’re dusting for fingerprints and taking photos of his potted plants. This is a standard police investigation technique in this movie – meticulously pouring over a crime scene despite that fact that a crime never took place there, and completely ignoring people and places directly involved with RK. For example,
they never bothered to interview the hot dog vendor from the start of the movie, even though he met RK face to face. The cops eventually leave, and Kevin goes back to writing his thesis. He pulls it out of his desk and finds THIRD DRAFT written across it in spoooooooky black felt pen. Actually, it turns out Kevin wrote that himself. He just naturally writes like Freddy Krueger. COULD THIS BE A CLUE? Also in his desk is a hollowed out bible with a mysterious (!) ringing phone in it. RK is back, and he tells Kevin not to get the police involved or he’ll tell them Kevin’s horrible secret. What does Kevin need to do to stop this from happening? Publicly announce his horrible secret. Neither one of them sees the problem with this. In the meantime, RK threatens to kill Kevin’s old dog, which currently lives with his Aunt. Kevin’s real phone rings, and Kevin hangs up on RK to answer it, so just forget the “genius” comment I made earlier. The person on the other end is Sam, an old platonic (this is Fox Faith, remember) female friend who just saw Kevin on the news. She wants to make sure Kevin’s okay. He doesn’t get the chance to tell her, because a pissed off RK phones back, and naturally he has to answer that phone now. Kevin has 60 minutes to save his dog from his Aunt’s house, which, according to RK, he “swore he would never go back to.” Does this have something to do with Kevin’s horrible secret? Of course, and it also leads to the three most mind-bogglingly insanely fucked up characters in thriller movie history. The Three Stooges would have stood out less.
It turns out Kevin’s Aunt, Uncle, and cousin are retarded. Not “retarded” in the sense of, say, Jennifer, but quite literally retarded. “Mentally handicapped” retarded. His Aunt Princess (seriously) wears a tiara, his Uncle Eugene wears a fez, and speaking of Stooges, his cousin looks like fat Moe Howard. Wait, the three Stooges? Is the movie trying to make a joke? Anyway, they’ve never left this house, and they spend their days editing huge stacks of newspapers and cutting the faces out of pictures of politicians and inserting the face of President Eisenhower. Really, I’m not making this up, this actually happens.
Not wanting to alert the police, Kevin takes the bus. It’s a good thing the bus stop across the street is for a route that goes right to his Aunt’s front door. Aunt Princess yells at him for running away when he was younger, which begs the question of how the fuck she won custody of a small boy in the first place. We get a flashback to Princess tying up young Kevin, gagging him, and hosing him down in the shower. 
This might be related to his horrible secret somehow. Who knows? Anyway, the dog, Damon, is okay, until Uncle Eugene closes the door to the doghouse and it erupts into a gigantic fireball that destroys most of the backyard. This upsets everyone, although not enough to call the police. No one else in the neighborhood seems to notice this either, as no cops ever sho
w up to question why the backyard exploded. Maybe it’s commonplace to see sky-high fireballs in the middle of the night in this community. Kevin goes home, leaving his family to clean up the mess (doghouse bits, dog bits, etc.) themselves. Words do not do this scene justice. This movie is worth renting just for this one scene, especially when Princess leans over the remnants of the chain link fence and screams “LEAVE!” over and over at the departing Kevin.
Kevin returns home just in time for the standard thriller scene where we see a mysterious person who we’re supposed to think is the killer is taking the elevator to Kevin’s apartment, but it turns out to be a friendly face. The movie finds this concept terrifying, and this scene is dragged on agonizingly long, even though anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie before knows that the killer isn’t just going to show h
imself 20 minutes in. Surprise, surprise, it’s only Sam. How she got access to his apartment without a key and without calling is anyone’s guess, but Kevin doesn’t question it at all. A CLUE? OR WHAT? The two of them go over RK’s riddle, and Sam solves it in seconds – night falls, and day breaks, so the answer is “day and night”! Of course, it’s so obvious; the whole thing is, like, a metaphor, or something! Having seen this movie three times now, I’m still not 100% sure what it’s supposed to be a metaphor for, and keep in mind I already know the shocking twist. Come back to it after you’ve read the end of this review, maybe it’ll make sense to you. Anyway, Sam decides to play detective (even she seems to realize that Jennifer isn’t quit Sherlock Holmes), and takes some evidence so she can do some investigation of her own. She wants to dust for fingerprints, and the obvious solution here is to remove evidence from a crime scene and not inform the cops of the whole “exploding dog” incident. She puts the hollowed-out book in a bag, and puts a wet “control sample” coffee spoon in right on top of it. Between Jennifer’s detective skills and Sam’s forensic expertise, Kevin’s safety looks to be in fine hands. Sam leaves, and we get another flashback – Kevin as a child sneaking out of Aunt Princess’ house of horrors to talk to Sam, and her giving him a kiss. This scene is accompanied by spooooooooky music, although I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
Back in modern times, we get a sudden cut to RK, alone and babbling about Kevin to no one in particular, while tearing up strips of duct tape and applying them to his face. He tracks a drunk Henry (remember him?) down in a flashy dance club’s parking lot and kidnaps him. Considering Henry was about 15 seconds away from driving home completely shitfaced, most of the audience will be rooting for RK at this point.
The screen now tells us that it’s Day 2. We’re only 25 minutes in to the movie, but by this point it really does feel like day 2. Kevin walks out of his apartment and checks out the headline in a nearby newspaper box. It’s about him. “RK ATTACKS SEMINARY STUDENT”, it says. Underneath it states “RK bombing linked to Riddle Killer”, which is pretty redundant, 
sort of like if the newspaper headlines the day after 9/11 read, “Terrorists Attack America; Terrorist hijackings linked to terrorists.” The article itself has no text (apparently this front page headline news isn’t very important), but it does have several pictures of burned cars, none of which appear to be Kevin’s. There’s another article on the front page about an arsonist burning down the world’s longest pier. This article actually has words written about it. If you pause the movie it’s actually readable, although it has absolutely no relation to anything. A+ for effort in the wrong direction! Kevin is accosted by an obnoxious photographer who comes out of nowhere to take his picture. Jennifer also comes out of nowhere, grabs the man’s camera, and exposes his film while vaguely threatening to charge him with something. The man angrily walks off as Kevin and Jennifer head back into his apartment to talk. Someone off-screen yells an angry “Hey!”, although who and why are never revealed. Maybe it’s the photographer, darting back after coming up with a snappy comeback to Jennifer. Inside the apartment, Jennifer starts looking for alternate ways in aside from the elevator. Considering the place was under full investigation from the police less than 12 hours ago, you’d think they might have already covered this. The astute Jennifer notices two cups of coffee on the counter and deduces that Kevin had a visitor the previous night. She’s using her detective voice again, so you know she means business. He tells her all about Sam and lets her know that she’s an insurance investigator. That certainly explains her access to a high-tech forensics lab. Sensing that things don’t quite add up, Jennifer asks if anyone else had swung by. Kevin confesses that not only had RK called him, but had actually come into his apartment to steal his cell phone back, and that he’d let Sam wander off with the only other piece of evidence. Instead of doing the sensible thing and getting last night’s forensics team back to scour the apartment again, Jennifer just chastises him for giving evidence away. “Do you know who you’re dealing with?” she scowls, “Three people have died, I need that book!”
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold the fucking phone one goddamn minute here! The Riddle Killer has killed three people? Ever? That means victim number three was Jennifer’s brother from the start of the movie. That also means that Jennifer wrote her book about a man who’d (at the time) killed a whopping two people. How can that possibly fill up an entire book? Can you even become an expert on a completely unidentifiable person who’s only ever done something twice? Did the filmmakers think that if they crammed the word “three” into the screenplay as many times as humanly possible that no one would care about the huge leaps in logic required just to make the story work? Gah, this movies is making my head hurt, and we haven’t even hit the half-hour mark.
Back to Jennifer’s inane ramblings, she’s now describing the situation using a chess metaphor. See, RK made a move that Kevin countered, and RK liked it. Now RK has to make another move. Why she picked chess when any other game or sport on Earth would work equally well, I have no idea. Considering the depth of this movie, Go Fish might have been more appropriate. We get another quick flashback, this time with child Kevin being chased by a bully. It’s maybe 3 seconds long, and we’re going to get to watch the entire scene fold out less than ten minutes from now, so it’s incredibly pointless and jarring to just stuff that little snippet in so randomly. Back to reality, Jennifer tells Kevin that RK is probably watching and listening to everything. “What, like now?” asks an understandably worried Kevin. “Shhh!” chastises Jennifer (she’s very good at chastising). This might have been more appropriate five minutes ago before they loudly talked about the police investigation, admitting to breaking the “no police” rule, saying Sam’s full name, giving alternate ways into the apartment, etc. A quick shot of RK’s lair shows us that yes, he did hear the whole thing, and now he’s super pissed. This doesn’t really matter, since he already has a full day of blowing Kevin up planned.
Now it’s time for my favorite scene in the movie, and quite possibly my favorite scene from any movie ever. It’s a stupidity and bad decision overload, surpassing even the scene from Shark Attack 3 where a man in a tuxedo drove a jet ski into a shark’s mouth. 
We see the recently kidnapped Henry walking up to a police station muttering “Help me!” over and over again under his breath. “WAGES OF SIN” has been scribbled on his forehead in black marker (or should I say spooooooky black marker?) He opens his coat to the receptionist to show her the time bomb (what else?) chained to his chest. It’s going to blow at 9:00am, which is a little over five and a half minutes away. Henry finally does the sensible thing at starts screaming and wailing for help. Jennifer gets the message about Henry, and her and Kevin race off to save him. She’s supposed to trying to save Kevin’s life, so why she’s driving him to the bomb is anyone’s guess. Talking on the phone to the police station, she learns about the message scribbled on his head and quickly deduces it’s a bible verse (everyone is fluent in Biblical verses in Fox Faith world). Kevin tells her it’s from Romans (seminary school pays off!), which she relays back to the police, which they quickly bring up on a computer monitor, which in turn solves absolutely nothing, although the music cues would have you believe otherwise. Arriving on scene, Jennifer immediately makes the completely illogical logic leap that since that particular verse is Romans 6:23, and the word “Romans” has six letters, the combination to the bomb must be 6/6/23. She hasn’t even seen the bomb yet, so how she knows it requires three numbers to unlock is beyond me. She’s right, of course. The police evacuate the building while Jennifer goes to disarm the bomb, which is the most logical thing anyone has done in this movie so fa
r. This inkling of common sense is quickly dashed as Sam rushes into the room, despite this entire situation developing only three minutes ago and no o
ne informing her about it. “You, and you, out!” Jennifer yells at them, and they do the sensible thing and actually leave. With everyone around her acting so sane, Jennifer counteracts by doing quite possibly the most insanely stupid thing in the history of cinema. She gets the bomb off with only seconds to spare,
and races through the now-evacuated and empty police station with it. Instead of letting it blow up inside where it would hurt absolutely no one, she instead hurls it out the window into the crowd of evacuees. Fortunately, a well-placed dumpster saves the lives of everyone. Kevin and Sam just stare, while two cops slowly approach the smoldering heap of garbage. Even the characters in the movie seem to realize that being anywhere near Jennifer is a safety hazard. It’s glorious! Jennifer should come with warning stickers.
Now we get some more incoherent ranting by RK, who seems to think he’s a lot scarier than he actually is. Maybe even he understands that Jennifer is more dangerous to the good guys than he can ever be. Kevin confesses to Sam that he knows who RK is – a teenager from their childhood that Kevin thought that he murdered, but may have actually just turned into a duct tape clad serial killer. Whoops. It turns out that back when they were kids, Kevin caught the teen watching Sam through her window. He chased Kevin into an abandoned warehouse, where Kevin turned the tables on him by 
beating him with a steel bar and locking him inside an inescapable stairwell. The teen was never heard from again. Apparently, Kevin’s sin is attempted manslaughter; quite a biggie for a seminary student. Kevin and Sam discuss this on the elevator ride up to his apartment, only to discover that RK was just there, and he… uh, set up an oscillating fan in front of Kevin’s thesis and blown the pages all over the room. Take that, Kev! Kevin and Sam spot a mysterious figure outside who’s either RK, the photographer from earlier, or both. Sam calls the cops, because RK never said that Kevin couldn’t call the cops, but he never said anything about his friends. This really seems like the wrong time to be arguing semantics.
Back at the police station, Jennifer is grilling Henry, who still has Bible verses written on his forehead. Poor guy isn’t even allowed to wash up! Jennifer gives Henry shit for not being able to identify the man wrapped in duct tape who chloroformed him. She gets the phone call from Sam, and leaves the victim interrogation to White Cop, as Black Cop glares from the doorway. Jennifer learns of the horrible page-scattering at Kevin’s and orders the police to cordon off a 20 block radius (!) around Kevin’s apartment. Kevin, meanwhile, finds his thesis’ missing cover page – it’s been stuck to his fridge door with a magnet (good God no!) and now has three vertical red lines drawn on it. Knowing that the serial bomber who’s out for his blood has just been in his apartment, and may in fact be watching him from right outside, Kevin doe the sensible thing and flings his fridge door wide open for absolutely no reason. Shockingly, there’s a bomb inside. And a television. And a VCR. It’s a big fridge, you see. 
Taking a cue from Saw, the TV plays a video of a jump-cutting RK giving Kevin another riddle, this time with a thirty minute time limit: “What takes you there but takes you nowhere?” Then the video ends and Kevin’s fridge explodes. Really. 
Fortunately, Kevin and Sam have the foresight to leap away from it in slow-motion, in a shot that looks cool when it’s Jason Statham leaping away from an exploding car, but much less so when it’s two dorks leaping away from an exploding kitchen appliance. Jennifer, who heard the whole thing over the phone, starts putting the facts together and realizes that RK is obsessed with the number three. She just figured this out? Isn’t she the world’s foremost expert on this guy? Didn’t she write an entire book on him? Anyway, Kevin’s finally had enough, and he calls up a local television station and confesses his attempted murder live on air. Kevin then talks to Jennifer back at the police station, telling her that things are 100% done now, no need to worry about that serial killer business any more. Never mind the exploding fridge, or the other bomb threat he just gave two minutes ago either. The cops don’t seem too worried themselves. In fact, they haven’t even bothered to send over a fire truck to deal with that whole “explosion” business yet. Then Sam looks out the window and spots a bus, causing her to make an absolutely gargantuan leap of logic (even compared to her day/night thing from earlier) – bus routes are circular, therefore the answer to the riddle is a bus. Kevin handily leapfrogs her logic, and concludes that there must be a bomb on the Route 33 bus, which has three routes, so it must be on the 3rd Ave line. Got that? 
He’s right, of course, and the movie rewards us with a bizarre CGI flythrough of the bus, whooshing through the undercarriage, through various pipes, etc. We finally come upon the bomb which turns out to be a giant wad of dynamite wedged under a seat. How the hell did somebody sneak that on unnoticed? Now that we know where the bomb is (the third Route 33 bus at 3rd Ave), it’s time for the movie’s big chase scene, which I like to call Magic Bus, for reasons that will be clear in a second. Kevin and Sam chase down the bus and force it off the road, screaming about bombs. Everyone clears out of the bus and runs for cover. So far, so good. 
Then they stand about 20 feet from the bus and just stare at it. In fact, Sam wanders into the bus, while Kevin takes another call from RK. Turns out Kevin confessed the wrong sin, and that he just admitted to attempted murder on national TV for no real reason whatsoever. Whoops! Kevin wrenches Sam from the bus (maybe she’s a bomb diffusal expert as well as a forensic investigator) moments before it explodes. 
Now, here’s where it goes from Bus to Magic Bus – after the fireball (and it’s a big fireball) settles, we see that not only has the entire bus frame survived the explosion, but so have the windows! Sam does the most logical thing and flees the crime scene, leaving Kevin to talk to the police alone. Sam’s going to go look through her father’s old police files. 
Of course her father was an old detective. He kept his records in an absolutely enormous old storage warehouse, just perfect for a big action sequence that doesn’t make any sense. Unfortunately we still have some more exposition to wade through before we get to that. Jennifer finds Kevin near the bus, and goes back into using her detective voice, whispering “He’s here, I know he is!” and glaring suspiciously at various rubberneckers. She sends Kevin away to a secret location, as the bus behind them randomly alternates between being exploded and unexploded.
RK is watching TV again, yelling “Liar!” at a news report about Kevin and the Magic Bus. No one on TV seems to make the connection that the guy who saved everyone on the bus is the same guy that just confessed to attempted murder half an hour ago live on the same program, and almost exploded in a similar vehicle bombing the day before. We see Kevin sitting at a restaurant, possibly pondering the same thing, when we see Jennifer walk in and sit down. Why couldn’t she just give him a ride if they came from the same place? She tells Kevin not to worry, that they’ll catch RK. She tells him this in a Scottish brogue. Then she gets up and leaves. I take it back, she’s not stupid – she’s completely fucking insane. Either that or her actress sucks at American accents. It’s probably a little bit of both.
Jennifer goes to see Kevin’s Aunt and Uncle on her own, and seems quite unconcerned that the glass on the front door is covered in newspaper, or that the woman who opens it is wearing a tiara. 
The ceiling-high piles of newspapers and edited photos of President Eisenhower only seem to strike her as a mild curiosity, instead of sending her running away screaming like the average person would do. I told you, she’s insane. Moe hits on her, to which Aunt Princess chides him and calls Jennifer a flea-ridden dog right to her face. Jennifer begins to suspect that maybe these folks aren’t quite playing with a full deck, and asks them when the last time they left the house was. No one remembers. She gives them shit for editing their reality and ignoring anything the outside world that doesn’t conform to their narrow-minded beliefs. This is impressive, considering it comes from a movie studio that thinks the Earth is 10,000 years old. 
Aunt Princess tells Jennifer about why children need to be homeschooled, and goes into the most bizarre overacting I’ve ever seen. She rubs her hands all over the newspaper stacks, poses like a 1940’s movie starlet, and grins like even she knows how crazy she sounds. Not one of them mentions the “exploding dog” incident from the previous night. The movie cuts to RK, who’s also editing newspaper articles. He doodles a giant pair of glasses on a picture of Jennifer, who’s already wearing a tiny pair of glasses. Is anyone is this movie not insane?
Next, Jennifer goes to the warehouse Kevin supposedly locked the teenager in. The door to the stairwell is forced open, apparently for the first time since Kevin locked it over a decade ago, to reveal – a jacket! Not only that, Jennifer somehow recognizes it as the teen’s jacket. This is just… goddamn this movie is stupid. This marks the moment where the entire movie starts falling apart. Almost nothing after this point makes the slightest bit of sense. Jennifer must agree with me, because she hypothesizes with the other detectives that the teen must have escaped the room through a vertical ventilation shaft that climbs into the ceiling.
Now we see Kevin walking into a bad part of town. We know this because there’s rap music playing on the soundtrack. Kevin’s here to buy a gun off of the pussiest looking hoods in screen history. He asks them for “a gun”, and they hand him a gun-shaped wad of newspaper out of the trunk of their car. He tucks it in his coat and darts off across the street. Me, I would check to make sure that the gun-shaped wad was actually a gun before running off, but I must be less trusting of criminals than Kevin is.
Back at the warehouse, Jennifer is wrapping more gauze around her injured hand. She makes chitchat with another detective, who accuses her of having “a thing” for Kevin. She doesn’t deny it, although the movie gives no indication whatsoever that she does. It cuts to Kevin at a hotel, who’s been moved there by the police after reporters started hanging around his apartment, and not because of the exploding fridge. Hyperventilating, he unwraps his gun. Three bullets are wrapped with it, and they fall out of newspaper as Kevin fumbles around. Sam knocks on the door, so he hides it in the one place he knows no one will find it – he puts it on a chair, and puts his jacket on top. Then he kicks the bullets under the bed. Ta-da! What a dumbass. Sam immediately finds a bullet, and then gives Kevin shit for trying to protect himself. RK, meanwhile, is listening to techno music and building bombs out of fuses, LEDs, and random scraps of wire. He sits down in a chair and goes blurry before the movie cuts back to Kevin napping in his hotel room. Sam gets a call from Jennifer, but is interrupted by a knock on the door. 
Jennifer finally starts getting a hang of this whole “detective” thing and advises Sam not t open the door, but dipshit Sam opens it anyway. All that’s outside is a lunch try with “IT’S SO DARK” written on it extra-spooky black marker. Also, it’s covered in duct tape, because that’s RK’s trademark or something. Duct tape mask, duct taping a dude inside a car, duct tape lunch try, etc. There’s a tape recorder under the lid saying “Let me out!” over and over again, so Sam obliges and lifts the lid. Sam deserves to get blown to bits for that, but astoundingly there’s no bomb, even though we just saw RK making a bomb less than a minute ago. Kevin wanders into the hall to see what the matter is. As he stands next to the door, we see the number three is scratched into it, although neither Kevin nor Sam seems to notice it. Hmm… Kevin, Sam, and a representation of RK are all standing around the number three. I just can’t put my finger on what this clue means.
Jennifer comes racing up to the hotel room to find it empty. Kevin and Sam have apparently taken the lunch tray into the room, and then used the lid to prop the door open. This gives her an ample view out the window of Kevin climbing into the passenger seat of Sam’s car outside and the car peeling away. The RK tape reads out another clue, “What wants to be filled, but will always be empty? The city fathers gave it a number: 3, 6, 9, 3, 3.” Jesus, I’m getting really sick of the number three, and the multiples really aren’t helping. As soon as the words are out of his (tape-recorded) mouth, we see Kevin and Sam pull up to Sam’s father’s storage warehouse at 369 33 RD ST. Oh for fuck’s sake, that’s even more unbelievable than the third Route 33 3rd Ave bus at 3:33 on the third day of the third month of three three three threethreethree GODDAMNIT! We get it! Three! We’ll remember it! It’ll sit in the back of our heads for the rest of this godforsaken excuse for a thriller!
SHUT!
THE!
FUCK!
UP!
CAUTION: EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
Whew, sorry about that, I feel much better now. Anyway, Sam goes in alone and locks Kevin outside for some unknown reason. She has a gun now too, even though she gave Kevin shit for buying one less than five minutes ago. Stumbling around, she finds part of Kevin’s thesis written on the wall in spoooooooooooky black writing; interspersed, of course, with the number 
three (gaaaaah!) She quickly gets her stupid ass captured. The warehouse door opens, and Kevin wanders in to find Sam locked in a makeshift cell. Also, a bomb. This movie has a lot of bombs. Kevin’s attempt at disarming the bomb fails, and with seconds to go, he makes a break for the exit. Along the way, he bumps into Sam, who finally remembered she was holding on to a gun and shot the lock off her cell door. 
Really. I want to say this movie couldn’t possibly get any stupider, but I’d be lying. Kevin and Sam go flying out the door, propelled by flames, in their second “dive away from the explosion like an action hero” moment of the day. The two head right back into the exploded building to find that it’s looking surprisingly good for a building that just lost an outer wall. They go back to the thesis wall to find a clue written on a scrap of paper that somehow survived the warehouse-encompassing fireball. The next clue is “Your house is afire”, which of course means a trip to Aunt Princess’ pad. Sam takes off for Kevin’s giant-assed loft while Kevin heads to save his Aunt. He runs into Jennifer and the rest of the police just as he’s leaving. So, two giant explosions in the middle of suburbia don’t attract any police attention, but one in an empty-looking industrial district gets two squad cars in under a minute? Okay. Kevin tells her thanks, but no thanks, he doesn’t want any help, and takes off without telling her where he’s going. Jennifer doesn’t even attempt to follow him. By now her voice sounds like Arwen if she’d been smoking two packs a day for six hundred years. RK, meanwhile, chloroforms a sleeping Princess and hauls her off to his lair.
Kevin shows up at Priness’ house to find Uncle Eugene and Fat Moe running around in a panic over the missing loon. Looking around the house, Kevin bumps into RK, who tells him that Princess is “where the worms hide their secrets” before running away. Fortunately, this is enough for Kevin to figure out where Princess is: in the bomb-building laboratory under the garden shed. The laboratory under the garden shed? Are you fucking kidding me? At what point did this movie turn into Resident Evil?
Sam arrives at Kevin’s and starts searching around for… I have no idea. She looks at the exploded fridge, she looks at the completely unharmed glasses sitting not more than two feet from the exploded fridge, and finally, she looks at Kevin’s thesis. 
She quickly realizes that Kevin’s spooooooooooky black writing matches RK’s. Aha, Kevin is RK! What a twist! She calls up Jennifer to tell her this shocking revelation. “It’s all about good and evil, light and dark” says Sam, to which Jennifer replies “Opposites!” She then looks at the thesis wall and realizes that the whole thing is made up of opposite words. The place has been swarming with cops for over an hour, and they hadn’t figured that out yet? One cops pipes up that he can’t figure out how many people had walked through the room, but there’s only one set of tracks through it, in men’s size 11 tennis shoes. No female footprints, and no other male. They’re stumped. Christ, these people are stupid. My dog has figured it out already you dumb shits! Quit dragging this movie out, the mystery is solved! God, there’s still 20 minutes left? Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck! The two decide to meet at Princess’ house to stop Kevin.
Speaking of Kevin, he’s confronting RK in the garden shed/giant underground bomb lab. I have to give props to a horror movie that can set its climax in a garden shed and still have it full of clanging steel doors and rickety rusty metal staircases. RK gets the drop on Kevin and makes his surrender his gun. 
RK introduces himself as “Slater”, and remarks on how he got everyone to think Kevin was RK. It’s all incredibly pointless since we’ve known exactly how the movie was going to end 15 minutes ago. Sam finds her way down to the standoff and quickly gets chloroformed and captured for the second time in two hours. Slater gives Kevin his gun back (!) and demands that he shoot Princess or else he’ll cover Sam in gasoline and light her on fire. Kevin could always do the logical thing and shoot Slater, but instead he screams in agony at the predicament he’s in. I hate Kevin.
Jennifer has finally made her way to the shed, and we see her slowly creep down the stairs and into the standoff room. This is it, the big final twist that you totally didn’t see coming! The one that they surely would not rip off of a gag in Adaptation. Jennifer slowly enters the room and turns the corner to find…
Kevin, all alone, pointing a gun at his own head.
They did it.
They actually did it.
I… I’m speechless!
Just wait, it gets better. Jennifer explains what’s going on to Kevin, occasionally slipping back into Scottish (sort of like Mel Gibson in Braveheart). She explains that she never saw Sam at the police station, and when she saw them drive away from the hotel window, she only saw Kevin get in the car. Sure, she saw him get into the passenger seat, and the car took off the moment he closed the door, but hey, anything’s possible. She only ever talked to Sam on the phone, but it’s entirely possible that Kevin can fool a seasoned detective into thinking he’s a woman just by changing the pitch of his voice (although hearing him talk as Sam, it just reinforces the “Jennifer is in the wrong line of work” angle). Kevin could easily plant bombs in his own kitchen appliances, and spray-paint his own car in the middle of the school parking lot. He could also kidnap someone, hide them, drive across the city, attempt to blow himself up, talk to the cops, and then drive all the way back to his victim without arousing the slightest bit of suspicion. Even Kevin starts to realize that none of this makes the slightest bit of fucking sense. Sam professes her love for Kevin, and then vanishes as she goes in for a kiss. Kevin shoots Slater, who also disappears. He drops his gun, and Jennifer gives him a hug. Fade to black.
The End!
Wait, no it’s not. The screen says it’s Day 3. Lucky us, there’s still a little more movie! Jennifer has cracked the Riddle Killer case! Kevin, wasn’t RK, he was just a copycat! It turns out RK was the hot dog vendor from the start of the movie. The cops take him down and find that his bomb-building shack is full of pictures of his next victim… Kevin. Fade to black.
The End!
Wait, it’s still not. Now it’s three months later, we’re at a mental hospital, and Jennifer is meeting with Kevin’s teacher from the start of the movie. They’ve decided that the real villain here is not Kevin, but Princess. This may be the only movie in history to villify the mentally ill. And what do they decide Kevin needs most of all right now? “We need the power of God!” says the teacher, ending the movie with a moral that has absolutely nothing to do with the preceding 100 minutes. Jennifer talks to Kevin one last time, and Kevin starts refering to her “Sam”. But it turns out he was just pulling her leg, and the two share a hearty laugh. What a funny guy! Man, remember that time he blew up a bus?
The End!
Plot: 3/5 Sideways Arches 
It’s basically the gag plot from Adaptation, minus the horse-versus-motorcycle chase. It takes balls to rip off a comedy in an attempt to make it scary. It fails spectacularly on every level, but points for chutzpah. Points are docked for Kevin’s crazy family, who seem to be from a completely different movie.
Themes: 3/5 Square Roots of Nine 
As funny as it was, the three thing really got on my nerves, especially when they started really ramping it up near the end. It’s almost like they three three three. Three three three three three.
Three: 3/3 Threes 
Three three three three three three three three. Three three three three three three three three three. Three three three three three three three three three. Three three. Three three threethreethreethreethreethree.
Goddamit!
