Really, the best I can do here is to refer you to Mark Kermode’s review ‘cos I agree with it entirely only I think I wanted, and even expected, to like this movie even more than he did. It feels like years since the news came out that Neil LaBute was announced as the director and just like the late Anthony Schaffer (the only mention of the original I’ll make in this review because it doesn’t deserve any comparison), I found that news very promising, and I say that having even now only seen the brilliant Nurse Betty. When I heard earlier in the year about the whole “matriarchal island” idea, it sounded intriguing, and I know that probably sounds weird from me. Even now, having seen it, I think the the idea of this movie is brilliant, I can imagine such a great movie, even with my usual total objection to most “gender stuff” I believe there’s a place for that movie – it’s just a shame they screwed it up so badly this time around.

The two most humongous failings of this movie, in order of badness, are the music and (big gap) the screenplay. The music … good god … did Angelo Badalamenti even watch the movie before composing this crap? Enough said. The screenplay – in every scene, it feels like each character is having a different conversation to the other character/s. I can see where it’s coming from, maybe, everyone has the conversation they want to have, but it seriously feels like no one even proof-read the screenplay for simple sense before handing it to the actors, and the actors really should’ve objected to the constant nonsensical non sequiturs, they’re certainly smart enough if their past careers are anything to go by.

It is, at best, hysterical. Step away from the bike? LOL. Step away from the box office. I don’t think I ever truly appreciated how brilliant the original is as much as I do now. Pretty much everything here is wrong. On the endings: I mightn’t have even noticed there were two different endings were I not evil and had I not downloaded and seen part of the original hokey diner ending around the time of the theatrical release. I didn’t watch it then because the quality was so bad, but I got the idea. The DVD’s ending is pretty much a facsimile of the original and therefore the best part of the movie. It’s an improvement on the theatrical, sure; but it doesn’t stop this being the most shameful movie I’ve seen this year (though I still have Little Man to sit through).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 5:22 am in 1 heart, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.