"Twisted" had the potential to be more than just another crime thriller starring Ashley Judd, which has become a genre all its own following "Kiss the Girls", "Double Jeopardy" and "High Crimes".

For starters, Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff", "Henry & June", "Quills") is the director, so you'd hope his fearlessness would elevate the film beyond the usual conventions.

And for a while, he's successful.

Judd's character, San Francisco homicide detective Jessica Shepard, would be a walking cliche if she were a man.

She's a tough, volatile alcoholic who picks up random men at bars for rough, anonymous sex to avoid facing her childhood demons: the death of her mother at the hands of her police officer father, who then killed himself when Jessica was six.

Screenwriter Sarah Thorp, in her first feature, isn't afraid to apply these characteristics to a woman, and to make her seemingly unredeemable.

Aside from being beautiful and having some innate detective skills, Jessica doesn't have much going for her.

(And speaking of her looks, here's a minor quibble: Jessica kills off at least a bottle of cabernet sauvignon by herself every night and wakes up hung over every morning to the shrill sound of her cell phone, but never looks puffy and never puts on weight. Average mortals would be freakishly bloated, but this is Ashley Judd.)

But Thorp's script spirals wildly out of control as "Twisted" approaches its climactic twist (which you'll probably be able to figure out about a half-hour into the movie). Jessica is investigating a series of murders that all look the same: The men's heads are bashed in with a blunt object, then their hands are burned with a cigarette.

And all the men just happen to be Jessica's one-night stands ? but she can't recall where she was when the killings happened, because she gets drunk and blacks out every night.

Even though Jessica becomes the prime suspect, she's implausibly allowed to remain on the case with her partner, Mike (Andy Garcia), because the police commissioner (Samuel L. Jackson, filling in for Morgan Freeman, Judd's usual co-star in these films) is a father figure to her. He was Jessica's father's partner and raised her after her parents died.

Clues become obvious but the motives become hazy. There are the usual red herrings: Is a rival in the homicide department trying to frame her? Or could it be her partner, Mike, with whom there's been tension since her first day on the job?

Maybe Jessica really is the killer; she thinks she's going crazy, which we could figure out for ourselves without snippets of dialogue ringing repeatedly in her ears like a chorus.

The hole in the plot twist is so big, it's more like a doughnut, and even the fine work of reliable actors like Judd, Jackson and Garcia can't save the film from its ridiculous conclusion. Solid supporting performances from Camryn Manheim as a medical examiner and David Strathairn as a police psychiatrist are a welcome diversion for a while but also go to waste.

In the end, "Twisted" really is just another crime thriller after all.

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