Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Lewis Hicks, a true crime reporter who's a bit down on his luck. We find that he is separated from his wife, not getting along with his girlfriend and gets too little time to visit his son. His life gets more complicated... and more intense, when he crosses paths with a psychotic serial killer. When he chases him down, he gets beat up by the killer and then loses him when he dashes down a dead-end alley and somehow vanishes.
What's worse, the local homicide detective, Ed Beker (Yancey Arias), has it in for him because of a piece Lewis recently wrote, and Beker seems to be looking at Lewis more as a suspect, rather than a key witness. This, and the fact that Lewis has more faith in his own detective skills than those of Ed Beker, leads Lewis to start his own investigation into this mysterious killer. When he returns to the alley where he confronted the killer, he finds the killer's journal, with not only sketches and descriptions of previous kills, but details on additional kills not yet committed. Lewis tries to run down some of the clues from the book, but the killer shows up, confronts Lewis and recovers his book. Now, Lewis only has two names and dates that he managed to copy down when he had the book to go on, and it's a race against time to catch the killer while he has leads to go on.
When Lewis calls in a few favors and has the evidence he's collected analyzed, nothing makes any sense, and all clues dead-end with James (Austin Abrams), a troubled young boy in a group home. Lewis takes it on himself to talk to the boy, in the hopes of determining his connection with the killer and to use that link to catch the killer, if possible.
The more that gets explained, the less that makes sense, and Lewis discovers that knowing is only half the battle... Now it's up to him to convince the police of what he's learned or stop the killer, himself.
I may have gone into this with somewhat low expectations, what with the straight to video aspect and all, but, given the movie, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Ticking Clock starts out slowly and suspenseful, but steadily increases in speed and interest as the movie progresses. It may not have had what it takes to be a blockbuster at the theaters, but I found it to be a very good story, which hooked me early and spent the movie reeling me in.
