Shutter Island: Having read the novel years ago, I knew what the plot twist was going into the flick, as I’m sure many people have. So to me, it became less about what happened rather than how they were going to stage it. The ending of the book never really rang true to me (seemed like a tacked-on cop-out that negated large swaths of the story out of sloppiness. It‘s easily the weakest of Dennis Lehane‘s books, not to mention shortest). Set in the early 1950’s, Leonardo Dicaprio is Marshal Teddy Daniels, a widower and veteran, who is traveling to Shutter Island to the Asheclif Hospital for the criminally insane after a female inmate disappears from her cell. Once there, Daniels begins to have vivid, disturbing dreams and flashbacks, and reality and fantasy begin to intermingle as the proverbial “not everything is as it seems” monster runs around the room with its head on fire. Directed by Martin Scorsese, it has an artificial, forced feeling almost immediately (how many surreptitious winks can one director make in five minutes of film about the plot?). It tries to be gothic and gloomy, but comes across as too clean and sharp. Definitely a minor Scorsese effort. This is the kind of movie that Alfred Hitchcock would have knocked out of the park, and with fewer special effects. Unfortunate too, as the cast is a great bunch of actors – Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Ted Levine, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow. And the only ones who really acquit themselves well are Haley and Kingsley. A disappointing book makes a disappointing movie. Woodchuck, “Lived down to my expectations.”
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