The Woodsman

Kevin Bacon pulls out all his acting chops (except for the one he famously, and impressively, showed in Wild Things), but it’s not quite enough to save this movie from some overly Hollywood characterizations. Bacon plays Walter, a child molester who’s just been released from prison. Struggling with his desires, he splits his time between working in a woodshop, listening to a police officer tell him about fairy tale woodsman and getting some wood by following young girls around. Mos Def is, indeed, most def as the policeman assigned to harass Bacon, and Eve and David Alan Grier are supremely natural as his co-workers. Unfortunately, the script’s many strong points are blunted when Bacon becomes a hero of sorts, giving this otherwise very different and thoughtfully disturbing tale an overly neat means of humanizing its degenerate protagonist. Might be worth seeing for the acting and some strong scenes, but it’s too convinced of its own importance to escape from directly moralizing.