It has been a very long time since Martin Scorsese made a great movie, and also a long time since he made even a good movie (I guess one could argue for The Departed or Gangs of New York - but I thought both were only OK and mostly derivative of earlier stuff of his). Shutter Island falls into a growing category of his recent films: terrible movies.
The story is about Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio)a U.S. Marshal in the 1950s who is called out to the eponymous island, an insane asylum and jail, in the Boston Harbor where a violent woman criminal has broken out of her cell mysteriously. Somehow, though it's not clear what exactly he's doing there, he is supposed to find her on this isolated island he's never seen before (because the guards who know the island well are unable to do it).
We find out that Daniels' wife and kids were murdered recently and the man who did the job is on this island behind bars. Daniels also doesn't know his brand new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), who just started in his department the morning they start the case. The bald-headed doctor on the island, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) is super weird and mysterious too. Oh, and it's foggy and rainy the whole time - because sunny and clear wouldn't be scary enough.
As Daniels tracks the missing woman around the island, he becomes more concerned that the inmates are being mistreated with electro-shock treatments and begins to question his own sanity. He has flashbacks to his time in World War II when he liberated a concentration camp and found out about some of the electro-shock experiments the Nazis had done to some of Jews. Oh - and one of the doctors on the staff of the hospital is German. Blah, blah, blah.
It's hard to imagine a cast of such talented actors (DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer) could all put out such consistently bad work throughout this film. All around the acting almost not serious it is so overdone. That Marty didn't see this is shocking to me; that he would direct actors this way is also shocking. And then they all struggle with the Boston accent. I think Leo is a very good actor, but I don't think he has the chops for accents the way some actors do. He's very naturalistic and organic and he struggles with the accent here as much as he did in Gangs of New York.
The script by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the Dennis Lehane book is a freaking joke. (I've never heard of her, but I see she was a producer on Avatar, so she has *that* going for her and hopefully she's made enough money from that that she won't ever have to work again... Oh, God I hope so!). It jumps back and forth between the present and the past and a fantasy world that it's almost impossible to figure out. Then it twists so many times - and not all that unexpectedly - that you end up getting a very different movie than you started with (like The Sixth Sense meets the Bird Man of Alcatraz). What's worse, the twists are telegraphed three scenes before they happen so it's impossible not to see them coming before they do.
(I would also like to say here that of the three Dennis Lehane books that have been adapted to the screen - this one, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone - it surprising to me how good and how bad some of them are. In order, Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck is the best, Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood, is very OK but not worth the Oscar attention it got, and this turd is the worst. So you have Affleck is better than Eastwood who is better than Scorsese... I never would have believed that!)
This film is directed terribly. I don't know how it's possible, but Marty has clearly lost something. The dubbing is terrible so you can hear when looped in dialogue is clumsily spliced into certain spots. In the few scenes where blood is seen, it looks like Marty went to the Hammer Studios makeup department and got some ketchup to spread all over the place (a big change for a man who used to deal beautifully with blood - in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas). There also seems to be no control on the story or the script. It goes on for at least 30 minutes too long, running 2 hours and 18 minutes. There is absolutely no need for this last 18 minutes, but it should be even shorter than that. What ever happened to a nice 112-minute movie, Marty?
There is nothing good about this film whatsoever. It is boring, totally trite and totally confusing. The acting, directing and writing is terrible. I guess the photography by Robert Richardson is nice, but I thought it was generally too cliche (grays and blues outside and blacks and golds inside - boring). Somewhere in the middle of the film, maybe in one of the many Nazi flashbacks, I strongly considered walking out because the story was going nowhere and I the twists coming down the pike were uninspiring. I stuck with it, but now I'm considering whether that was a good way to spend those 70 minutes of my life. I'm not sure it was.
Stars: .5 of 4
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