DRAGONFLY

I can't figure out what happened to Kevin Costner. I am not ashamed to admit that I loved Dances With Wolves, and saw it three and a half times in the theater (the "half" was when I walked out of a screening of The Doors in a foul mood, and walked straight into the next theater, knowing a dose of Wind In His Hair would perk me up again). Shoot, Bull Durham was great, and even Field of Dreams, though sappy, was certainly watchable. But since then, Kevin's movies (or maybe his movie choices) have sucked. And Dragonfly won't help his resume.

Dragonfly will be inevitably be compared to The Sixth Sense. In fact, it wants to be compared to The Sixth Sense, because, you see, The Sixth Sense was a great movie. Alas, Dragonfly is not. Nowhere near.

The premise is interesting enough. I can see why those involved, like Oscar-winners Kathy Bates and Linda Hunt (both wasted, as the lesbian-neighbor-best-friend, and a nun, respectively) may have found the storyline interesting. But casting Kevin Costner as a mourning widower just doesn't work. He just doesn't... emote very well.

Kevin is Joe, an ER doctor whose save-the-world wife dies in the field as a Red Cross worker in Central Amercia. His wife was in a bus that plummeted from a cliff into a raging river, and like many of the victims, her body was never found. This information is given to us in an action-packed prologue. You think, "Say, this might be good..." But then we are immediately thrust into the rest of the film, which is as slow as mud.

Joe's wife is trying to contact him from the dead. Her symbolic talisman, the dragonfly, swarms against the bedroom window. Things appear rearranged in the house. Maps fly across the rooms. The lights always seem to go out, and there is always a storm-a-brewing outside for effect. Even Joe's parrot flips out. On top of this, children at the hospital start giving him messages from his wife, and drawing strange symbols after their near-death experiences. We know that Joe is having a hard time with this because his brow is slightly furrowed, and when he is alarmed, his mouth opens slightly agape in horror and disbelief.

All of this goes on for more than two-thirds of a film that feels very long at almost two hours. It is the last act where the pieces fall together and things start to get a little interesting. By by then, we're already bored to death (no pun intended). It took me two sittings to get through this DVD, because I fell asleep in the middle of my first attempt.

  DVD NOTES    

Don't be fooled by the DVD extras trumpeted on the box, like "Thrilling Deleted Scenes" and "Best-selling Author Betty Eadie on her near death experience". The deleted scenes were probably cut because they were even more dull than what made it into the film, and the short segment with Betty Eadie talking about near death experiences made me squirm uncomfortably because she came across as a bit too saucer-eyed New-Agey for me. And call me bad, but I couldn't stand to watch the film again just to hear director Tom Shadyac's commentary.