| SECRET WINDOW |
 2004 – USA
Director: David Koepp - Reviewed by Vickie
I'm sorry to say that Sercet Window does just that. Based on a novella by Stephen King, the film stars a perpetually bathrobe-clad Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, a successful writer with an annoying facial tick, who's holed up in a remote cabin to get some work finished and wallow in self-pity about his impending divorce. His wife, Amy (the horribly underused Maria Bello), was unfaithful (with Timothy Hutton, of all people!), so Mort blew his stack and their marriage fell apart. It also doesn't look like Mort's showered in a very long while, so that might have something to do with their parting. Who knows. Anyway, in the middle of one of his afternoon naps, Mort is awakened by the sound of someone pounding on his cabin door. He opens the door to find John Shooter (John Turturro), an eerily calm but clearly psychotic Mississippi man with a tall, black villain's hat crafted by Ain't We Amish!, who arrives with a serious grudge and a molasses-thick drawl. (If I never hear Turturro angrily turn "story" into the overly elongated "STAAAAW-ree" ever again, it'll be too soon.) Shooter, who seems to be of a very determined one-track mind, says Mort stole his staaaw-ree. Says Mort ruined the ending. Says Mort owes it to him to rewrite the ending of their shared staaaw-ree and to have it published under Shooter's name. Says Mort better do what he asks... or bad things will happen. Needless to say, Mort laughs off the suggestion, closes the door and, well, bad things start to happen. Once he's good and scared, recovering-alcoholic Mort starts to wonder if maybe Shooter's right—maybe, in a drunken stupor, he *did* steal the staaw-ree. It doesn't matter, though, because until Mort can somehow prove he's the tale's original author, Shooter's on a bit of a terror spree. Writer-director David Koepp—who penned the terrifically taut Panic Room—knows a thing or two about cranking up the suspense in such a way as to keep the audience on the edge of its collective seat. And, for the first two thirds of the movie, he does just that. Who's John Shooter? Why is he so angry? Why does he scare the pants off me while his accent makes me giggle? Is he a psycho? An obsessed fanatic? An evil spirit? A writer with a problematic need for validation? For the love of Pete, why doesn't Mort use his head and take any number of easy outs to this mess?! To answer that would be to give away the film's big, fat plot twist and subsequent descent into an eyeroll-inducing climax that cheapens the entire project and turns it into B-movie schlock. It won't really be a surprise (to anyone who's ever watched a movie, or even a bad soap opera, before) and it immediately deflates the proceedings to such an extent that I didn't even care how the movie ended. I was ready to leave. I wanted to stand up an scream, "You've GOT to be kidding me! That's it?! That's the big surprise?! If you weren't going to let Maria Bello do more than a cameo then the least you people could have done is come up with a cohesive, believable, worthy ending!" Whatever. Buh-bye. The performances were okay, although Johnny Depp looked like he was trying too hard and John Turturro, while appropriately frightening, had this weird underlying blandness. The tension was fun up to a point, but the ending ruined it all. And, sadly, that's what will stick in my memory long after I've forgotten Mort, Shooter, Amy and the stupid garden. |
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: I *hate* it when a
potentially great movie blows it by tacking on a lame-ass ending or
moronic plot twist that's meant to be clever but winds up sucking the
life of whatever transpired before it.
