Screenplay Zero  Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley struggle through
floundering frights  You know how fear is scary? Well, director
E. Elias Merhige is into that, especially in his new serial-
killer thriller Suspect Zero. Absent, however, is the dark-comic
malevolence the director smartly cultivated in his successful
and disquieting Shadow of the Vampire a few years ago, bullied
and bulldozed out of the way by stock noirish chills and a
passé, late-blooming David Fincher fetish. Merhige is too
talented to be dismissed as a wannabe, but here his gifts for
clever angles and oogy feelings are tethered to blasé genre
redundancies and very clunky storytelling. Looks great, less
thrilling. I blame the screenwriters.  Yes, because this is a
movie about wanton torture and cruelty, let's rustle up Zak Penn
(Inspector Gadget) and Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) and smack 'em
a couple of times each with a newspaper: Bad screenwriters! No
Oscar! Clearly they had some fun, stealing liberally from The
Hitcher and The Silence of t