Thoughts on Body Count

On Hulu, I watched Body Count, an 90’s home invasion movie starring Justin Theroux, Alyssa Milano, and Ice-T. I remembered seeing it on shelves at Blockbuster years ago, and was interested, but my family never rented low-budget stuff, just Hollywood stuff. It was pretty good, an effective thriller that also had Tiny Lister in it in a tough guy with a soft side kind of role. He still killed people, but had some good comic lines about being a loser at gambling and only winning bets in his mind.

The basic plot is that Theroux and Milano are a couple going to see his super-rich family for the weekend, and his family gives a hard time about not having a career direction and being passive-aggressive jerks towards him. Then while the couple are in the basement, Ice-T and his guys bust into the house, kill everyone, and start stealing artwork. So the couple are trying to avoid detection and survive this invasion, and it gets pretty tense and suspenseful to watch, with Ice-T giving the best performance of the film. He just injected so much energy and charisma in the film, and dominated his scenes.

I was surprised to see Theroux in the lead role, since he was a virtual unknown in 1997, and didn’t get more widely known until being in indie films of the 2000s, as well as being the villain in the second Charlie’s Angels movie. He did well in it, though he has an odd voice, it’s a little affected to sound tough or “dark.” Milano was fine, she’s a decent actress and was in her period of starring in low-budget movies until Charmed brought her back to the mainstream.

Hulu though messes up with partially giving away a major plot point. The first line of the summary describes Theroux’s character as a hired professional. That could mean anything, but I took it to mean hit man. And so I waited throughout the movie for that to come into play, and his criminal life (he’s portrayed as the innocent hero for much of the film) is revealed in the last twenty minutes. The summary doesn’t totally spoil the film, but it does give away that he has a secret that he’s been hiding, so it blew the story a little.