This week's "I was supposed to be surprised by that, huh?" thriller is called "Taking Lives."

It actually does have a clever twist near the end, but it's not the main twist, which is anything but terrific. The style here is straight out of "Seven," though too timid to be equally shocking.

There is a good performance by Ethan Hawke and a quizzical one from Angelina Jolie. Neither achieves Johnny Depp heights, although "Taking Lives' " premise is more interesting than "Secret Window's."

It all adds up to adequate suspense entertainment. But it's still a shame considering the intriguing premise of Michael Pye's source novel. The book took us inside the head of a particularly modern serial killer; he chose his loner victims carefully, then assumed their identities until their credit cards maxed out. The movie is more about catching the killer, with the whole identity theft thing relegated to plot point.

Jolie's FBI profiler Illeana Scott is allowed to run around Montreal, firing her gun with impunity in the streets of a sovereign foreign nation. She drives recklessly, too.

Illeana's invited up north by an old buddy, Leclair (Tcheky Karyo), now the head of le metro homicide. A string of grisly murders has the local detectives just stumped, so Illeana's unorthodox methods (she's introduced lying in the latest victim's shallow grave) are clearly called for.

There's a break in the case when an art dealer from Winnipeg, Hawke's James Costa, interrupts a murder in progress. Though he's not in time to save the poor man, Costa becomes an invaluable police source - and, by extension, the killer's likely next target. A mutual attraction with Illeana makes his new, live-bait status even trickier than it already is.Many dank, secret-stashed rooms are investigated to Philip Glass' unnerving score, under Amir Mokri's washed-out, decay-emphasizing cinematography. Director D.J. Caruso applied some of the same stylistic tics to his less-disciplined, more irritating but definitely quite original feature debut, "The Salton Sea." But he's mostly working from the playbook David Fincher wrote for "Seven" and "Fight Club."For his part, screenwriter Jon Bokenkamp seems enamored of the same trick Joe Eszterhas wore out in "Jagged Edge," "Basic Instinct" and other cookie-cutter movie mysteries.Those movies at least possessed a hard-charging conviction when it came to their material's perversity. "Taking Lives" lacks that passionate sickness. It's more like one of its own villain's shallow appropriations of somebody else's lifeblood.