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'The Trigger Effect': Firing Blanks

In case we miss the point, writer-director David Koepp opens "The Trigger Effect" with an Oliver Stone-like shot of coyotes testily acting out their instincts on fresh meat. The message: They're animals and we're not.

Or are we?

That is a question, one of several clumsily posed and essentially unanswered in the first major feature by Koepp, who's written or co-written scripts for "Jurassic Park," "Carlito's Way" and "Mission: Impossible."

Yet despite a solid cast -- Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue, Kyle MacLachlan and Dermot Mulroney are the principals -- and impeccable technical elements (notably Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography), "The Trigger Effect" feels half-cocked, undermined by its apparently very low budget and Koepp's flaccid directing. For instance, he sets the table with a long, single-track opening shot in which assorted individuals move through a multiplex lobby, theater and parking garage. There, a contagious flurry of casual rudenesses confirms all the characters' short tempers, as well as the internal mechanisms that stop them just short of genuine confrontation.

Getting home from the movies one night, an already-shaky suburban couple, Annie (Shue) and Matthew (MacLachlan), find their baby bawling with an ear infection. Before their pediatrician can call in a prescription, the power goes out. Everywhere. Which means no phones, no television, no radio, no light, no ATMs, no nothing (including overreaching movies at the cineplex).

What if we suddenly found ourselves without power and information, Koepp wonders. The correct answer is powerless and clueless, but that's apparently too simple, so Koepp has designed a Rube Goldberg plot in which one event triggers another, exacerbated by sexual, racial and social issues that suggest that maybe we can't all just get along. In case we miss this point, there are shots of gathering storm clouds, as well as portentous readings from the children's book "Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind." And as matters get worse, people's behavior seems to devolve, their "human-ity" imperiled by their survival instincts.

Unfortunately, Koepp's characters are not the only ones left in the dark: The audience is, too. Unlike the foreboding spaceship shadows of "Independence Day," there's never an explanation of the power outage or any indication of its scale, and its victims seem totally incurious about its cause. Worse, the ultimate resolution of the drama is as sudden and unexplained as its origins -- as if everything consequential has happened off camera.

Among the subplot movers: Joe (Mulroney), odd man out in a triangle with Annie and Matthew, but responsible and pragmatic; Gary (Michael Rooker), hoping to gas-and-go in strictly rationed and increasingly irrational times; and Raymond (Richard T. Jones), a black man who is not what anyone else in the film imagines him to be. All perform with proficiency but never really engage the viewer. As for Shue and MacLachlan, she'll not be earning a second Oscar nomination from this role, and he's been in much weirder situations working with David Lynch.

The Trigger Effect is rated R for language and violence.