Sociopaths set ‘Pathology’ on the wrong path

Call me crazy, but even at a mere 93 minutes, “Pathology” feels way too long to me.
Granted, I could tell from the trailer that this wasn’t going to be a great movie. Frankly, Milo Ventimiglia, best known as Peter Petrelli on the American TV drama “Heroes,” as the leading man was the only draw for me. Who doesn’t like eye candy?
Ventimiglia plays Dr. Ted Gray, the new kid at New York’s fictional Metropolitan University’s medical school. Fresh from a stint deworming orphans in Africa, or whatever golden boys supposedly do there, he’s come to shake things up over at the pathology lab.
From the beginning, Gray isn’t welcome. His posture’s too good and his hair is immaculately combed, and that just will not do with the too-cool-for-school doctors in the lab.
“A bleeding heart — I cut one out of a dead body,” big man on campus Dr. Jake Gallo (Michael Weston) spitefully says when he meets Gray and learns of his work in Africa.
But after a few days of shoving poor Dr. Gray around, Gallo and his sexy gang decide the newcomer’s sexy enough to party with them. And unlike the similarly young, attractive doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Scrubs,” unwinding after work doesn’t mean a beer at the bar around the corner.
Perhaps Gallo and gang have been huffing too much formaldehyde, or maybe they’ve been hitting the crack — on prominent display throughout the film — too hard. No amount of beer will do for these baddies: For them, the only way to really rock (after smoking a rock or two) is to artfully kill people, which they refer to as “The Game.”
Best of all, The Game allows them to nail causes of death to the cases no one else can crack in the lab. Genius!
Well, except for the fact that instead of focusing on the thrills, Pathology is problematically preoccupied with eye candy of two disparate varieties.
T&A abounds, the former belonging to Alyssa Milano (yes, she’s still around!) as Gray’s fiancee, and Lauren Lee Smith, Gray’s enticing classmate Juliette; the latter is Ventimiglia’s own.
For the blood-and-gore fans, Pathology offers plenty to get your jollies. The movie’s marriage of grisly with sexy places it squarely in the category of torture porn — because ooh, isn’t it hot to slice up a pimp after you’ve had your way with his prostitute?
I would say hell no, but Pathology says YES, OH YES!
Then there’s the problem of the plodding screenplay and utterly unlikable characters. Obviously, Gray’s going to take the cliché downward spiral with the Gallo gang, then try to pull himself up with a blowout climax. But then the movie just keeps going... and going.
At least audiences will be able to entertain themselves with placing the vaguely familiar faces among the cast. You’ve seen Weston before — oh right, he played Private Brian Dancer in a stretch of Scrubs episodes!
And why does Dr. Stravinsky, the only nice guy, look so familiar? Add some black hair dye and a scowl, and you’ve got Todd, the dour gay artist from “Wedding Crashers.”
Even so, that’s not enough fun to redeem Pathology. We may as well rename it “Sociopaths.”

By Hannah Bae Contributing Writer [hannahbae@gmail.com]