It’s not often that you’d find a feature film starring Richard Gere and Claire Danes to go straight to DVD in the U.S., but apparently that’s what happened to their 2007 project The Flock. I’d never heard of this movie before renting it last weekend, and when I went to get some info on it from IMDB.com, I learned of its fate. It was released in theaters in a few overseas markets, but went straight to DVD here at home.
At any rate, I still thought it might be worth watching, so I gave it a shot. As it turns out, the distributors were right in wanting to steer clear of this one.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Gere stars as Erroll Babbage, a Department of Public Safety employee whose job it is to monitor sex offenders in the area. He often goes way too far in this capacity, harassing all of the ex-cons on his list instead of simply abiding by the rules and asking them approved questions. Because of these maverick ways, Babbage is being ousted from the department, and must now train his handpicked replacement, Allison Lowry (Danes).
At first, Lowry is disgusted by Babbage’s methods when she sees him in action. She’s a by-the-book person, and doesn’t understand why Babbage acts the way he does. He tells her to give it a few months on the job, then she’ll see.
The personal bickering is temporarily put aside when Babbage and Lowry hear that a high school girl named Harriet Wells (played by Kristina Sisco) has been kidnapped. Babbage is certain that the perpetrator is a sex offender that he’s interviewed before, so he becomes obsessed with tracking down the missing girl before he’s forced into retirement.
The rest of the film then deals with Babbage and Lowry’s unofficial investigation as they frantically try to find Harriet before it’s too late.
My Reaction: The production quality of The Flock wasn’t that bad, which leads me to believe that the film was shelved solely because of the plot. Even though there was just a single storyline, the movie inexplicably managed to feel disjointed and meandering most of the time. Don’t ask me how that’s possible; that’s just how it felt when I was watching it!
I think the biggest reason for this disconnected vibe was the fact that it was hard to figure out what was going on. While Babbage and Lowry were firmly established as characters, no one else was, including the possible suspects, which made the whole investigation difficult to follow. I don’t think I even caught any of the other characters’ names, so I had no idea who Babbage and Lowry were talking about when they discussed the suspects.
Also, some of the scenes were downright indecipherable. For instance, there was one involving Edmund Grooms (played by Russell Sams) where he gets assaulted by a masked figure while he’s watching girls out in front of a hotel. Who did that? Was it Babbage? Someone else? I have no idea, and while I admit that I wasn’t paying much attention to the movie at that point, I really don’t think it was ever made clear.
Danes and Gere made for a strange onscreen pairing. I know there wasn’t meant to be any romantic chemistry between them or anything like that, but they just never seemed comfortable together, which made the movie hard to get into.
Overall, there were too many problems with The Flock to overcome — including the hard-to-follow main plot — so the film never quite got off the ground. I give it just 4.0 stars out of 10.