D-Tox (2002)

Director: Jim Gillespie

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Charles S. Dutton, Polly Walker

Synopsis: A cop trying to dry out at a remote rehab clinic finds that he has been followed there by the serial killer he was hunting before his breakdown.

Sly Stallone (Rocky, Escape Plan) plays a damaged cop who turns to the bottle when his girlfriend is slaughtered by the serial killer he’s been hunting in Jim Gillespie’s D-Tox.   His boss and friend (Charles S. Dutton – Legion, The Perfect Guy) enrols him on a rehabilitation program in the wilds of Wyoming headed by crusty old Kris Kristofferson (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Heaven’s Gate). While there he meets up with assorted other damaged cops, including a good old British bobby (spot the bad guy).   One of Kristofferson’s assistants is the delectable Polly Walker (Curtain Call, 8 1/2 Women), with whom I would gladly go through rehab – even though I had trouble sitting through the entire running time of this entirely daft nonsense.

It turns out that Sly’s nemesis has followed him to this rehab centre, which looks like some kind of medieval dungeon, full of windowless grey concrete corridors, and is picking off the recovering cops one by one as a blizzard rages, effectively cutting them off from the outside world.

They don’t come much dafter than D-Tox, which, after a promising first reel, quickly deteriorates into a sequence of cat and mice chases, all of which – apart from the final one – end in some unlucky victim meeting a grisly death.   Most of the characters are either too unlikeable or too sketchily characterised for us to give two hoots whether they buy it or not, and the bad guy looks more like a put-upon chemistry teacher than a psychotic serial killer.

(Reviewed 10th November 2011)