Gothika - Just a BOO! Movie

my rating: Nathan's rating:

You now how the last month and a half of the year is supposed to be when the movie distributors put out their best stuff, hoping to attract holiday movie-goers' cash, and some 11th-hour Oscar nominations? You wouldn't guess it from this week's new releases: a film "adaptation" of The Cat in the Hat done with erection gags instead of charm, and Gothika, which takes a premise with potential for some real drama and instead just delivers a lame "boo!" movie.

The premise is explained well enough in the previews: Halle Berry is a prison psychologist who - after a strange incident driving home, in which she apparently sees a ghost - wakes up to find herself on the other side of the glass walls, apparently insane and guilty of murdering her husband. Robert Downey Jr. is her (now former) colleague and perhaps her only hope.

But the whole situation is handled so implausibly. Not only do they dump her into the prison population with her not-necessarily-appreciative patients, but nearly every co-worker suddenly treats her like just another nutcase, not a person they used to work with on a daily basis. Maybe the point was to show how people's attitudes change about someone who's "crazy", but people don't just change like that. At the least they wallow in denial, refusing to believe it for a while.

On top of this implausibly forced "characterisation" is a lot of equally tired cinematic hack work. The opening scene with the doctor and one of her patients consists almost entirely of foreshadowing of how she'll feel when The Tables Are Turned and she's the patient. It's a Dark and Stormy Night. The power keeps going out at inopportune times. The creepy blue lighting flickers... a lot. And instead of letting the anxiety of the situation create tension, there's lots of rising-pitch background music to put you on edge, and people/things popping out of the dark to startle you. You know you're watching a bad movie when you have people in the theater openly laughing at this stuff.

Actually, I'm not sure these people realised they were watching a bad movie. Maybe it was the throngs who came just to see Halle Berry semi-nude (including a swimming scene, various short-prison-dress scenes, a nude shower scene, and a few wet-t-shirt scenes), but the dopey - often leering - comments coming from all around me made a mediocre movie even more aggravating.

The ending of the movie includes an epilogue to the main action that's apparently meant to provide some poignant closure, by bringing us back to the doctor and her patient. But even "the end" is ruined by putting a big question mark on it, with a very brief sequence that suggests that It's Not Completely Over. She still sees dead people. Gee, maybe next they can do a team-up movie with Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense. "Halle and Haley: She's a psychiatrist. He's a troubled kid. Together they're detectives!" On second thought, strike that idea: Haley's movie was genuinely suspenseful and intriguing. Halle's just shouts "boo!" a lot.