The Devil's Teardrop

2010

Action / Crime / Drama / Mystery

1
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 32% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 4.9/10 10 696 696

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Plot summary

When a man known only as "The Digger" opens fire in a train station many are left dead. The only clue the FBI has is a hand written letter with demands on it. Agent Margurete needs help analyzing it and the best is retired specialist Kincaid.


Uploaded by: FREEMAN
March 26, 2023 at 02:36 PM

Director

Top cast

Natasha Henstridge as Margaret Lukas
Rena Sofer as Joan
Gabriel Hogan as Len Hardy
Tom Everett Scott as Parker Kincaid
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
812.76 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 28 min
Seeds ...
1.63 GB
1920*1080
English 5.1
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 28 min
Seeds 1

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by nogodnomasters 6 / 10

MEDIOCRE CRIME DRAMA,

The movie opens with a killer (John MacDonald) shooting people in broad daylight at 12:00 in Union Station, Washington DC. We get to see the killer's face. In spite of this, there is no good description of the killer who looks like Dolph Lundgren and apparently there are no cameras in use there either. The authorities get a note and phone call from a Russian accented man, whose grammar is incorrect. The note asks for a ransom, or else the killer, known as "The Digger" will continue to kill. The killer drops black shell casings as his calling card.

Easy enough. You plant the money with a tracking device, then nab the guy...unless the guy dies crossing the street in a hit and run and there is no one to pay the ransom to. Natasha Henstridge plays Margaret Lukas, the FBI person in charge of quickly locating the killer before he kills again.

The movie runs with a brief subplot with Tom Everett Scott as Parker Kincaid. He is the best manuscript expert who left the FBI over an incident which still gives his son Robby (Jake Goodman) nightmares. His daughter Shannon (Rachel Marcus) seems well adjusted. His drunken ex-wife (Joanna Jang) is now sober and plans on getting married. She is serving papers so she can have custody of her children who she has been trying to buy with gifts. Olivia Jones plays Parker's attorney.

Of course the two plots run together as Parker consents to help. He tells us things about the man who wrote it and possible future targets. Natasha Henstridge appears to have some past emotional issues in case this crime story didn't have enough drama.

The movie is made for TV with its timely commercial fade outs, complete with a few notes of dramatic music. It has 3 Canadian award nominations.

The title, "Devil's Teardrop" comes from the handwriting analysis, the way the "i" was dotted. The movie was more mediocre crime drama than "chilling suspense" with more drama than action. The acting was a bit bland. I thought Rachel Marcus was good as a child actor while Joanna Jung was almost comically bad. There really wasn't any great dialogue.

Note: The FBI has a machine that can read indentations on a piece of paper (ESDA). It is so sensitive it can read up to the previous 5 pages of indentations. It is nothing like what the movie shows us.

Reviewed by rmax304823 4 / 10

A Cornucopia Of Clichés.

There is some surface tension in this story of two mass-murdering villains who plot to rob money from a police stash and kill a graphologist (or whatever he is), but the tension derives from hoary cinematic techniques and plot devices.

I'll give an example of a hoary cinematic technique and plot device. Thus: In an attempt to track down the villains by means of deduction, physical evidence, and computer skills, three investigators (including Henstridge and Scott) locate his lair in an abandoned warehouse. They creep upstairs to the loft, guns drawn, and examine the refrigerator and cabinets they find there. Henstridge open a cabinet door. There's a BOMB inside -- with a red digital read out. (Close up of numbers ticking down from the three minutes before detonation.) "Get out! Move!", shouts Henstridge. But Scott delays, tugging at some papers lodged between bricks. (Close up of read out showing about two minutes.) Henstridge rushes to Scott, tugs him, the papers come loose and they rush towards the door. (Close up of read out.) One of the guys stumbles on the staircase and the others hurry to help him to his feet. (Close up.) The three hobble awkwardly down three flights of stairs. (Close up.) They finally reach the street and run like hell. (Close up, showing all zeros in red digital read out.) BOOM, and the fourth floor is blown to bits. This is known as "cross cutting" and the first time it was used, as far as I'm aware, was in 1903, in Porter's "The Great Train Robbery." That is to say, at the time of this production, the technique was one hundred and four years old.

The rest of the plot has little to add, except that, instead of one murderer who is going to commit mass murderer at midnight, there are two who will commit the murders in different places. At times the plot seemed slapdash and confusing but I missed part of it, having been interrupted by a margin call from my broker. It took longer than I'd expected to convince him that the master was out and I was a maid with laryngitis.

You may wonder about the title. What is a "devil's tear drop," or is there any such thing? Well, in the novel and the movie there is. I don't know how common the term is among handwriting experts. You know -- when you dot a lower-case i -- you ordinarily leave a simple dot, like a period? (I disregard those who dot their i's with tiny circles or little hearts.) The devil's tear drop begins with a dot but then continues upward and to the right, diminishing as it goes, as if it were a transplant from a Chinese character.

The main theme of using documents to uncover the identity and location of the murderers might have been genuinely interesting, and informative as well. I don't mean deconstructing the writer's personality from the way he writes his letters. I'd guess that most experts can often tell a woman's writing from a man's, but beyond that it's mostly conjecture. The graphologists had pinned down the "Son of Sam" killer as an artist or engineer because of his neatly printed letters, whereas in fact he was a disorganized paranoid schizophrenic. But the main theme is clotted with back stories about family troubles in the lives of Henstridge and Scott, which I found irrelevant and boring.

Reviewed by boblipton 5 / 10

Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

This is a decent although unremarkable thriller in which the FBI recruits an ex-agent who is an expert in verifying and examining documents. He has a lot of personal issues including an ex-wife who wants the kids and a son who is still suffering the after-effects of being terrorized by a murderer he had put in prison several years before.

Although director Norma Bailey does a decent job in all departments and the actors handle their roles competently, the movie itself soon falls into fairly predictable patterns and scenes and the potentially interesting idea of showing how the analysis of documents and profiling of killers actually works is reduced to a few gadgets and flashes of insight. Instead we are distracted by family drama.

I cannot tell if the poverty in the script is due to Jeffrey Deaver's novel or to Ron Hutchinson's adaptation. I am not familiar with Mr. Deaver's works and the two other movies I have seen written by Mr. Hutchinson -- who also co-produced this TV-movie -- have not been very interesting, so I suspect it is not Mr. Deaver's responsibility. However, whoever is responsible, unless you are a fan of the genre, you can give this a miss.

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