SUSPECT ZERO

[ 1/2] (One and one-half stars)

Ho-hum. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity, nudity). At the Empire, the Kips Bay, the New York Twin, others.

THE clichéd and predictable “Suspect Zero” is the latest evidence that Hollywood has run the serial-killer thriller into the ground through overuse – the same way it earlier exhausted, say, buddy action-comedies.

This genre fatigue, foreshadowed by “Taking Lives” and “Twisted” earlier this year, invariably involves a deeply disturbed FBI agent or cop tracking a serial killer. The twist of “Suspect Zero” is that the killer is targeting other serial killers – specifically, the title character, who is so adept at not leaving patterns that he has racked up a body count of hundreds of children.

Unfortunately, the focus is not on the killer, which might have made for an interesting movie, but on the trite law enforcer out to get him.

Even if you haven’t seen the trailer – which gives away everything – it’s not hard to figure out the culprit within about five minutes.

“Suspect Zero,” directed by E. Elias Merhige, who helmed the striking “Shadow of the Vampire,” starts out promisingly.

At a roadside café in New Mexico, a traveling salesman has an unnerving encounter with Benjamin O’Ryan (Ben Kingsley), a strange-looking man who shows him some weird drawings.

The salesman turns up dead and mutilated, followed quickly by another victim.

The case is assigned to Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart), who’s been reassigned from Dallas to the sleepy FBI office in Albuquerque after a six-month suspension for bringing back a serial killer from Mexico without extradition papers.

When that very serial killer turns up as the next victim, suspicion begins swirling around Mackelway.

Or is the culprit O’Ryan, who turns out to be a renegade FBI agent trained in reading minds and “seeing” crimes before they’re committed – and who bombards Mackelway with hundreds of faxes of missing children? (Again, this is all in the trailer.)

Merhige maintains interest for a while with visual tricks, but the script, attributed to Zak Penn (“Last Action Hero”) and Billy Ray (“Breaking Glass”), is so riddled with implausibilities and stereotypes (the child-killing serial murderer is a long-haul trucker – surprise!) that the flick ends up being much less than satisfying, despite a truly creepy performance by Kingsley.

Eckhart does the standard tortured hero, complete with the usual exasperated FBI agent ex-girlfriend (Carrie-Anne Moss, in little more than a cameo) and exasperated FBI boss (ditto Harry Lennix).

“Suspect Zero” ends with one of the two main characters begging the other to put him out of his misery – a sentiment the exasperated audience may well share by that point.